American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Bodys Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life Lunden Jennifer

A Silent Spring for the human body, this wide-ranging, genre-crossing literary mystery interweaves the author's quest to understand the source of her own condition with her telling of the story of the chronically ill 19th-century diarist Alice James--ultimately uncovering the many hidden health hazards of life in America.When Jennifer Lunden became chronically ill after moving from Canada to Maine, her case was a medical mystery. The doctor she went to for help told her she was "just depressed."After suffering from this enigmatic illness for five years, she discovered an unlikely source of hope and healing: a biography of Alice James, the bright, witty, and often bedridden sibling of brothers Henry James, the novelist, and William James, the Just 21, unable to hold a book or stand for a shower, she lost her job and consigned herself to her bed.