num_pages: 341
description: Lia Lee was born in 1982 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy. By 1988 she was living at home but was brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, over-medication, and culture clash: "What the doctors viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance." The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, written with the deepest of human feeling. Sherwin Nuland said of the account, "There are no villains in Fadiman's tale, just as there are no heroes. People are presented as she saw them, in their humility and their frailty—and their nobility.
language: English
title: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
titlecomplete: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
genres: Biography, Science, Health, Medicine, Medical, Nonfiction, Sociology, History, Memoir, Anthropology
ratings_count: 80901
awards: awardedAt: 852105600000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Current Interest, awardedAt: 852105600000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: General Nonfiction
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux