Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives
Author(s): Brian Dillon
"Tormented Hope" is a book about mind and body, fear and hope, illness and imagination. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. And in an intimate investigation of those nine lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body, by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings. Brian Dillon, whose brilliant debut "In the Dark Room" established him as an uncommonly intelligent and fluent explorer of the realm where ideas and emotions overlap, looks at nine prominent hypochondriacs - James Boswell, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol - and what their lives tell us about the way the mind works with, and against, the body. His findings are stimulating and surprising, and the stories he tells are often moving, sometimes hilarious, and always gripping.
Product Information
Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. He writes on the arts, books and culture for a number of publications. His first book, In the Dark Room, won the Irish Book Award for Non-fiction in 2006. He lives in Canterbury.
General Fields
- :
- : Penguin Books Ltd
- : Penguin Ireland
- : 0.427
- : 03 September 2009
- : 222mm X 144mm X 29mm
- : Ireland
- : books
Special Fields
- : Brian Dillon
- : Hardback
- : 1
- : 362.196852500922
- : 288