The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

As I often say when I recommend this in the store, this is Laura's favorite book ever, but, really, it's one of my favorites too. Fadiman's story of the tragic misunderstandings between American medicine and immigrant Hmong culture after an infant girl is diagnosed with severe epilepsy is a modest masterpiece of journalistic empathy, tirelessly curious about the people, history, and science connected by Lia's illness without losing sight of the limits of what a journalist can know, or what the two cultures can know about each other.