Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged illness

Are You My Guru? How Medicine, Meditation, and Madonna Saved my Life

Are You My Guru: How Medicine, Meditation, and Madonna Saved My Life is Wendy Shanker’s follow-up to The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life. It is a hilarious and inspiring account of Shanker’s battle with Wegener’s disease, a rare autoimmune disease that results in inflammation of blood vessels in various organs.

Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is a professor of Women’s and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley and author of Forced to Care. Perhaps because of her vocation, the book has a bit of a textbook flavor to it, but as it progresses, she lets go and begins to fill it out with a more humanistic view.

Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature

The pockmarks on the Aztec figure on the cover of Suzanne Bost’s Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature are a reminder of the proximity of disease, illness, and pain to death.

Sick: A Compilation Zine on Physical Illness

It surrounds us. No matter how difficult, awkward, or painful, we will inevitably come into contact with it. But despite its ubiquity, physical illness continues to be one of the most challenging subjects for people to broach. Sick is a compilation zine on physical illness that offers up the experiences and perspectives of individuals living with illness.

Louder Than Words: Emily

There were two things that drew me to this book. Firstly, the title is Emily and, hey, that’s my name, too! Secondly, and more importantly, the story revolves around a young girl called Emily whose life is plagued by physical illnesses, which she endearingly calls “Emily flu.” Could this book possibly be written about me? Alas, whilst I just suffer from chronic hypochondria, literary Emily has a genuine disease; the rare and incurable West Nile Virus.

La Americana

This review will probably be a bit dated, as Nicholas Bruckman’s 2008 documentary appealing for more welcoming U.S. immigration policy has been superseded by our new president’s openly liberal views on the issue.