The Empathy Exams: Essays

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize

A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain--real and imagined, her own and others'--Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory--from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration--in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 04/01/2014
ISBN: 9781555976712
Pages: 226
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.60w x 0.70d
Award: New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association Award - Winner
Award: Indies Choice Book Awards - Honor Book

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 01/06/2014
Booklist 03/01/2014 pg. 13
Entertainment Weekly 04/04/2014 pg. 70
Shelf Awareness 04/04/2014
Library Journal 04/15/2014 pg. 84
New York Times Book Review 04/13/2014 pg. 26
People Weekly 04/21/2014 pg. 55
New York Times Book Review 04/06/2014 pg. 26
New Yorker (The) 05/12/2014 pg. 75
Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2014
Publishers Weekly Best Books 11/03/2014 pg. 27
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 12/07/2014 pg. 28
Kirkus Best Nonfiction 12/01/2014 pg. 29
Entertainment Weekly 12/12/2014 pg. 75