The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

For nearly thirty years this has been the book that brings outsiders to the Hmong, usually by way of a nursing or medical school syllabus. Fadiman reconstructs the collision between the family of Lia Lee, a Hmong child with severe epilepsy, and the county hospital in Merced, California, and she extends both sides more patience than either received at the time. It remains a landmark of medical journalism and the standard text on cultural competency in American health care. Read it for what it is, a meticulous outsider's account, and then keep going; the Hmong-authored memoirs on this shelf tell the same history from the inside. Essential for clinicians, social workers, and students meeting Hmong history for the first time, and the reason many of them come looking for every other book in this catalog.