- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Ireland; First Edition edition (3 Sep 2009)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1844881342
- ISBN-13: 978-1844881345
- Product Dimensions: 22.8 x 14 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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- #64 in Books > Science & Nature > Medicine > Medical Sciences A-Z > Health Psychology
Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives
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Product Description
Review
`Illuminating' --Philip Hoare, Sunday Telegraph
`Brian Dillon is a superbly careful writer. ... [This book] will delight, move and horrify any of the millions of us who, like the late Spike Milligan, have at one time or another contemplated having "I told you I was ill" inscribed on our gravestones.' -- Sam Leith, Daily Mail
`The language is fluent and cogent, the story telling economical and deft. And the whole is a feat of compression ... This is a superb book about a fascinating subject and one I'd recommend to anyone' --Carlo Gebler, Irish Times
'You don't need to be a hypochondriac to enjoy this series of discursive, insightful essays that are full of quirky details and fascinating anecdotes'. --James Dellingpole, Mail on Sunday
`Strangely delightful ... Dillon's book is constantly intelligent'
--Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
`Excellent'
--Kevin Jackson, Sunday Times
`Brian Dillon is a superbly careful writer. ... [This book] will delight, move and horrify any of the millions of us who, like the late Spike Milligan, have at one time or another contemplated having "I told you I was ill" inscribed on our gravestones.' -- Sam Leith, Daily Mail
`The language is fluent and cogent, the story telling economical and deft. And the whole is a feat of compression ... This is a superb book about a fascinating subject and one I'd recommend to anyone' --Carlo Gebler, Irish Times
'You don't need to be a hypochondriac to enjoy this series of discursive, insightful essays that are full of quirky details and fascinating anecdotes'. --James Dellingpole, Mail on Sunday
`Strangely delightful ... Dillon's book is constantly intelligent'
--Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
`Excellent'
--Kevin Jackson, Sunday Times
Product Description
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 Brontë, 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.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
While not a topic I thought I was interested in, after reading the reviews in the UK press I bought this book. I have now just finished reading it and really, really, enjoyed it!
Right from the introduction, I was taken by the, at times unnerving, clarity in the way Mr Dillon writes about the experiences of bodily function that trigger whispering anxiety in the mind. All through the book there is an almost forensic attention in the writing; not a single word is wasted. The piecing together of the stories from letters, journals etc, makes this more than a descriptive history; instead it lays out the development of the webs of anxiety and maladaptive thinking and, interestingly, what turn out to be quite adaptive, or at least productive coping. Thankfully it doesn't go down the road of outsider art cliches! Humanity, with a steady eye, is the feel I get from this book.
I'm now off to by his previous book - In the Dark Room!
Right from the introduction, I was taken by the, at times unnerving, clarity in the way Mr Dillon writes about the experiences of bodily function that trigger whispering anxiety in the mind. All through the book there is an almost forensic attention in the writing; not a single word is wasted. The piecing together of the stories from letters, journals etc, makes this more than a descriptive history; instead it lays out the development of the webs of anxiety and maladaptive thinking and, interestingly, what turn out to be quite adaptive, or at least productive coping. Thankfully it doesn't go down the road of outsider art cliches! Humanity, with a steady eye, is the feel I get from this book.
I'm now off to by his previous book - In the Dark Room!
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I begun this book with enthousiasm, it explains well some of the neurosis of big men and women and it is very funny sometimes. However, it loses strenght along the manuscript. Dispensable.
1 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This subject has been done before - and done a lot better, most notably by Zachary Cope in the 1960s. Brian Dillon draws on a lot of other people's books to present a very secondhand treatment of the subject.
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