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  • The Empathy Exams

  • Essays
  • By: Leslie Jamison
  • Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
  • Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
  • 4.2 out of 5 stars (6 ratings)

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The Empathy Exams

By: Leslie Jamison
Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
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Publisher's Summary

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize

A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain - real and imagined, her own and others' - Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory - from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration - in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.

©2014 Leslie Jamison (P)2015 Audible Inc.

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Depth and richness

It seems to me that there are two ways to listen and be enriched by this book, these essays. She is an excellent writer who uses Rich turns of phrase and intelligent, poetic voice to communicate the stories themselves is one. The content of the essays; their ability to provoke both thought and emotion is the other.

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