Reading at Literati

From the inaugural winner of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, a riveting exploration of illness and medicine that imagines a more humane form of care.“What was wrong with them? That’s what we wanted to know.” So begins Jonathan Gleason’s collection of essays on the human lives behind the corporate, legal, and cultural practices that shape disease. Drawing on his experiences as a medical interpreter and patient, Gleason illuminates a stunning range of topics, including the racial dimensions of organ donation, the past and present of the AIDS crisis, and the troubled relationship between state violence and mental illness. With sharp analysis and boundless empathy, Gleason shows how medicine is shaped by cultural narratives, historical contexts, and the complicated people who practice it.

In her foreword, Meghan O’Rourke writes that “illness is often framed as a crisis to endure or overcome. But as Gleason’s work reminds us, illness is also a…