Book description
Tormented Hope
is a book about mind and body, fear and hope, illness and imagination.
It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship
between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the
terror, of being ill. And in an intimate investigation of those nine
lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body, by
distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings. Brian Dillon,
whose brilliant debut In the Dark Room
established him as an uncommonly intelligent and fluent explorer of the
realm where ideas and emotions overlap, looks at nine prominent
hypochondriacs - James Boswell, Charlotte Bront , Charles Darwin,
Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust,
Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol - and what their lives tell us about the way
the mind works with, and against, the body. His findings are stimulating
and surprising, and the stories he tells are often moving, sometimes
hilarious, and always gripping. Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in
1969. He writes on the arts, books and culture for a number of
publications. His first book, In the Dark Room
, won the Irish Book Award for Non-fiction in 2006. He lives in
Canterbury.
