WordPress ate my post

July 21, 2010

The WordPress app may have been too good to be true. I composed a post last week on Tinkers vs The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, and today, when I opened WordPress.com on Firefox, I realised that it’s gone!! AARGH. I’m going to have to switch back to making notes using a pen and a notebook now. Just in case.

Alrighty then, I guess I’m going to have to resort to mini reviews instead. Blame it all on the app.

So here’s the short version. Too many books, due dates, time spent with my mom who’s visiting = having to choose between Tinkers and The Spirit. Tinkers failed to win me over, despite its lovely prose. It is a love affair with the English language and a book that is dying to be read slowly, and parts of it read aloud. So it was not the book for me at the time. It is a book that one OUGHT to read, Pulitzer Prize and all, so I felt bad about putting it back in my library loot tote. Then again, hopefully the next person on the request list will have better luck with it and appreciate it more. Another book for another time? Who knows, I might return to Tinkers in the future.

But onto The Spirit. And unfortunately, WordPress ate that lovely quote I had about the Hmong, who are the focus of this book. The passage more or less summarized how different the Hmong way of life is from that of the US, where many Hmong refugees have settled. To sum it up, The Spirit is a book of medical anthropology, a case study of sorts on a little Hmong girl in California who has epilepsy. But it is also a story of a family’s love for this special girl (the Hmong believe that during spirits speak to epileptics during seizures and thus they – usually the males – become shamans), her doctors’ many struggles to help her and figure out her ‘uncooperative’ family, an extremely patient social worker, and the very interesting Hmong culture. Yet another fascinating non-fiction read.

Written by olduvai Posted in Reading Tagged with Anne Fadiman, Paul Harding