Roger    King
Love and Fatigue in America, records an Englishmanâ€™s decade-long journey through his newly adopted country in the company of a mystifying illness and a charismatic dog.,Â Â Â  When he receives an unexpected invitation from an unfamiliar American university, he embraces it as a triumphant new beginning. Instead, on arrival, he is stricken with a persistent inability to stand up or think straight, and things quickly go wrong. Diagnosed with ME diseaseâ€”chronic fatigue syndromeâ€”he moves restlessly from state to state, woman to woman, and eccentric doctor to eccentric doctor, in a search for a love and a life suited to his new condition. The journey is simultaneously brave, absurd, and instructive.,Â Â Â  Finding himself prostrate on beds and couches from Los Alamos to Albany, he hears the intimate stories offered by those he encountersâ€”their histories, hurts, and hopesâ€”and from these fragments an unsentimental map emerges of the inner life of a nation. Disability has shifted his interest in America from measuring its opportunities to taking the measure of its humanity. Forced to consider for himself the meaning of a healthy life and how best to nurture it, he incidentally delivers a report on the health of a country.,Â Â Â  By turns insightful, comic, affecting, and profound, Roger Kingâ€™s ,Love and Fatigue in America, briskly compresses an illness, a nation, and an era through masterly blending of literary forms. In a work that defies categorization, and never loses its pace or poise, the debilitated narrator is, ironically, the most lively and fully awake figure in the book.,â€œRemarkable. . . . [S]mart and funny. . . .[A]musing observations about everything American. . . . [T]his is not a traditional novel. . . . [T]his, as it turns out, is a brilliant perspective from which to view and write about life. . . . [G]reat reckonings unfurl in mere paragraphs.â€â€”,Jackson Newspapers.com,â€œAs the disease drives the narrator city to city, woman to woman, and doctor to doctor, it brings into relief many of Americaâ€™s follies and excesses, most notably our health-care system, which King portrayed as antiquated, bureaucratic, and inhumane. After more than fifteen years, America brings the narrator â€˜not aspiration realized, nor a largeness of life fitting to its open spaces, but the nascent ability to be satisfied with less.â€™â€â€”,The New Yorker
Autobiography,Memoir,Nonfiction,Health,Illness
Love and Fatigue in America