Breathless takes on the experience of asthmas as courageously as Styron's Darkness Visible took on depression. Courageous and profoundly moving, Breathless is a stunning meditation on memory and the body, on illness and creativity.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Afflicting more than ten million Americans each year, asthma is a disorder characterized by repeated episodes of chest constriction, difficulty exhaling, coughing, and (sometimes) wheezing, triggered by any number of factors ranging from allergens to cold air to emotional stress. Hypervigilance about environmental triggers is draining physically and emotionally but necessary to prevent additional attacks. Like Tim Brookes in Catching My Breath (LJ 7/94), DeSalvo (Vertigo: A Memoir, LJ 7/96) charts her personal journey through the chronic chameleon that is asthma as she searches for the root causes of her "breathlessness." Her emphasis is less on therapeutics (although there is a fascinating brief on the historical treatments for asthma) than on the effect a chronic illness has on one's productive capacity. She examines the mind-body connection in her own life?including childhood sexual abuse and a sister's suicide by hanging?and in those of other asthmatic writers such as Marcel Proust and John Updike. Recommended for health and holistics collections.?Anne C. Tomlin, Auburn Memorial Hosp. Lib., N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
DeSalvo recounts developing adult-onset asthma, which sapped her vitality and threatened her ability to work. She examines her breathlessness as an illness and as a response to pollutants and early traumas (meditating on her body's "betrayal," she sees warnings of the illness in childhood sexual abuse and the scar of her sister's suicide), and she tells of her persistent battle with the medical establishment for accurate diagnosis and effective treatment. A literary biographer herself, DeSalvo presents, besides her own experiences with asthma, the lives of, among other writers who endured the malady, Marcel Proust and John Updike, and also the asthmatic characters in their fiction, in an attempt to analyze asthma's effect on self-esteem and artistic productivity. Her oddly gripping book will especially interest anyone concerned with how trauma affects health. Whitney Scott
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2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not a book about asthma as a physical ailment,
This review is from: BREATHLESS CL (Hardcover)
I loved Desalvo's Crazy in the Kitchen and was very eager to read this book, as both my sons have asthma. However, I found this read extremely irritating. Of course, one can only write from one's own perspective, but Desalvo's perspective on asthma is so very different than that of so many asthma sufferers, young children. She seems overly involved in her own illness, and fascinated by her own symptoms, which do not seem terribly severe to me. Mainly, however, I was annoyed by her view of asthma as a illness caused by emotional trauma---a view that has long been discredited. Certainly it's a more interesting topic to write about than it would be to attribute asthma to traditional medical causes, and it allows her to explore asthma in literature, but it also reminds me of those bashing "refrigerator mothers" for autism. I think her asthma could be quite easily explained in part by living near NYC and driving through polluted air each day, and working in a closed building near smokers.
I think this book should be seen as a survey of asthmatics in literature, and not in any way as a depiction and explanation of asthma as a disease.
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