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Through the Shadowlands: A Science Writer's Odyssey into an Illness Science Doesn't Understand Hardcover – May 23, 2017
| Julie Rehmeyer (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Julie fully expected to be breathing at the end of the trip—but driving into Death Valley felt like giving up, surrendering. She’d spent years battling a mysterious illness so extreme that she often couldn’t turn over in her bed. The top specialists in the world were powerless to help, and research on her disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, was at a near standstill.
Having exhausted the plausible ideas, Julie turned to an implausible one. Going against both her instincts and her training as a science journalist and mathematician, she followed the advice of strangers she’d met on the Internet. Their theory—that mold in her home and possessions was making her sick—struck her as wacky pseudoscience. But they had recovered from chronic fatigue syndrome as severe as hers.
To test the theory that toxic mold was making her sick, Julie drove into the desert alone, leaving behind everything she owned. She wasn’t even certain she was well enough to take care of herself once she was there. She felt stripped not only of the life she’d known, but any future she could imagine.
With only her scientific savvy, investigative journalism skills, and dog, Frances, to rely on, Julie carved out her own path to wellness—and uncovered how shocking scientific neglect and misconduct had forced her and millions of others to go it alone. In stunning prose, she describes how her illness transformed her understanding of science, medicine, and spirituality. Through the Shadowlands brings scientific authority to a misunderstood disease and spins an incredible and compelling story of tenacity, resourcefulness, acceptance, and love.
- Print length336 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRodale Books
- Publication dateMay 23, 2017
- Dimensions5.8 x 1 x 8.7 inches
- ISBN-101623367654
- ISBN-13978-1623367657
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Julie Rehmeyer's inspiring memoir of surviving the ravages of M.E/C.F.S casts much-needed light on what it's like to live with a poorly understood disease. Humorous, compassionate, and motivated throughout by curiosity, Through the Shadowlands will powerfully illuminate this murky realm for anyone wondering what it's like to suffer and survive.”
—Meghan O’Rourke, author of The Long Goodbye
“Julie Rehmeyer is both a real scientist and an award-winning science writer. Her book will have the power to change lives.”
—Dave Asprey, New York Times bestselling author, author of Head Strong, and producer of the film “Moldy”
“Only a brilliant science writer could possibly traverse the mysterious landscape of America’s most misunderstood affliction with such grace. From the politics of scientific research to the far reaches of alternative medicine; from the nitty gritty of molecules to the depths of raw emotion — this is a riveting story that will change lives.”
—Joan Borysenko, New York Times bestselling author of Minding the Body, Mending the Mind
“Julie Rehmeyer’s self-taught journey through the murky world of mycotoxins, which she shares so eloquently in this book, has helped our whole clinical team change our protocols. With the help of the expert training of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, we are now testing and treating people with mycotoxin poisoning. It is wonderful to see people getting better!”
—Nancy Klimas, Director of the Institute for Neuro Immune Medicine and Professor of Medicine at Nova Southeastern University
“It is a privilege to have the singular journey through the outback of contested medicine narrated by a science journalist with the nuance, rigor, deep respectability and reporting chops of Julie Rehmeyer.”
—Pamela Weintraub, author of Cure Unknown and commissioning editor at Aeon
REVIEWS
"Science journalist Rehmeyer’s deeply personal illness memoir stands out for the lucidity of her self-analysis and pragmatism about managing a life turned upside down by chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). She emerges as simultaneously a science journalist frustrated with established medicine’s dismissiveness, a patient open to the pseudoscientific approaches of non-traditional practitioners, and a desperate woman reaching out to suffering peers on the Internet for support and advice. This last avenue ultimately leads her to an extreme removal of mold from her environment, starting with a body-resetting solo expedition to Death Valley. Exploring ideas of dependence and self-sufficiency, Rehmeyer shows her illness through the lens of her personal relationships—with her strange and abusive mother, mentally ill first husband, mostly distant siblings, and two successive partners, the second of whom is supportive where the first one is not. In this way, she explores her illness’s psychological aspects while never giving up the idea that CFS has a real and profound physiological component. Rehmeyer’s frustrated but cautiously optimistic story will resonate with readers who value an intelligent, scientific approach to life but wonder what to do when there aren’t any good answers."
—Publisher's Weekly
"Harrowing, raw and frequently inspiring... [Rehmeyer] writes as she has been forced to live: with great inner strength and determination." —Washington Post
"A moving portrait of a person living expansively in the face of setbacks and limitations... she is introspective and reflective, open to new ideas and people, and she forges strong friendships with many people around her, including neighbors and fellow science writers. Since reading the book, I've found myself reflecting more on my own emotions and thinking about how to cultivate the kinds of relationships she has with family and friends. Through the Shadowlands is a gift, and I am grateful that Rehmeyer trusts us with this frank, intimate look into her life." —Scientific American
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
February 2012
The tent was possessed. Death Valley’s wind breathed a wicked life into it, whipping it into a writhing demon intent on freeing itself from my grasp and flying off on some maniacal mission. Determined to put it up, I engulfed as much of the tent in my arms as I could, stomped on it with both feet, tugged on the strip of webbing holding a grommet, and strained to bend the tip of the tent pole toward the hole. I howled with effort and the sound tore away on the wind, just as the tent so wanted to.
I knew I was breaking my own cardinal rule: Stop When You’re Tired. That rule had burned itself into my brain over the dozen years since I’d first developed the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome, the illness I had come to the desert attempting to outwit. Even mild exertion could leave me nearly paralyzed the next day, sometimes unable to turn over in bed.
Now I was spending all my strength wrestling with this nylon and fiberglass fiend. Before I left home, I’d made sure I was capable of setting up this borrowed hurricane-grade tent, but I hadn’t counted on a hurricane-grade wind. I was miles up a jeep trail off a long dirt road in the middle of the godforsaken desert, alone except for my dog. Should I wake up crippled and call for help, my shouts would shred in the wind long before they reached a human ear.
On top of all that, I didn’t even much believe in the mission that brought me to the desert in the first place. I had come to Death Valley on the theory that I needed to get clear of mold—from moldy buildings, from mold in the outside air, from mold in my belongings. Strangers on the Internet had told me there was a good chance that mold had triggered my illness and that by strictly avoiding it, I would eventually recover. I had never had any obvious reaction to mold in the past, but my Internet advisors told me that when I returned home after two weeks in the desert, the mold in my own house and belongings would likely make me dramatically sick. And then, at last, I would know what was doing me in.
This whole thing is probably a crock of shit, I’d thought, but at least it’ll make a good story.
The truth was, though, that I was desperate to get better. Over the previous year, my health had deteriorated so much that I could barely work, often couldn’t walk, couldn’t even take care of myself. I had gone to the top specialists in the world, and I’d pretty much run out of medical options. I would soon run out of money, too, and I had little family to turn to. I was 39, and I had no idea what was going to happen to me. Consignment to a nursing home?
Without that level of desperation, I couldn’t have brought myself to pursue a theory that so many scientists sneered at. I was a science writer and a mathematician, and science was my primary lens for viewing the world. Coming to Death Valley had unmoored me from both my physical and intellectual homes.
The wind tried again to rip the tent away as the last pole snicked into its grommet. Thank god, I thought, clutching the tent harder. I allowed myself only a moment to catch my breath, not wanting to let my exhaustion undo me. Then I began pounding stakes into the ground.
My two-year-old puppy, Frances, bounded up to me, her brown nose covered in fine tan sand, and then she ran off in pursuit of a fly. I smiled—she, clearly, wasn’t a bit worried about the tent or the wind. I watched her leap and snap at the invisible insect. At least I’m not completely alone, I thought.
I plodded 50 feet to the car to gather essentials before I ran out of energy. As I reached toward the trunk, I stopped, arrested by the valley that surrounded me. Bands of red and blue and yellow and pink rippled through the mountains facing me, the peaks’ geological story written on their naked flanks for all to read. The Panamint Mountains at my back were ever so slowly listing eastward like a great ship keeling over, the summits twisting higher as the valley floor sank. Salt flats shone white on the valley floor, the residue of millennia of rain that had run off the mountains and evaporated, carrying a load of salt and minerals to join the dried-up remains of Pleistocene lakes. Except for a few tiny cars inching along the road ten miles away, I saw no sign of a human being.
I felt myself expand into this great space, this emptiness. Despite the wind’s immense swirl of energy, the land felt quiet, still, impassive. Everything fell away from me—my body, my pain and exhaustion, my fear, my strange experiment—and was replaced with a huge and ancient stillness. All the time, I thought, this place was here, whether I was pinned to my bed or bounding up a mountain trail. As I poured out into the valley, I felt the valley pouring into me, its enormous spaciousness filling my chest.
The wind buffeted me, and I staggered. I returned to my task, gathering a couple days’ worth of food to take to the tent in case I couldn’t make it back to the car the next day. Then I returned for my sleeping bag, pad, and Frances’s blanket. All were new to me—one of the requirements of this experiment was that I leave all my own belongings behind, since everything I owned, on this theory, was contaminated with mold. The sleeping bag and pad I had borrowed from a friend, and the cheap blanket came from Target. I could only hope they were mold-free.
After the weeks of slow preparation, I had made it. It was only 6 p.m., but I was done for. I called Frances into the tent and curled up in my sleeping bag.
Before I left for Death Valley, I’d told friends that I felt like I was going to the desert to die. I fully expected to be breathing at the end of the trip, but I couldn’t keep everything together as I had been doing for years, holding on to my responsibilities and dreams in spite of the barriers my illness threw in my path. Whether the experiment worked or didn’t, the life I had lived was over. I was staring into a cavernous darkness, beyond any imagined future I could invent. I wrapped my arms around my dog and closed my eyes. Okay, I thought. Whatever is next, okay.
PART 1
DESCENT
CHAPTER 1
CONSTRUCTION AND DESTRUCTION
Summer 2000
12 years earlier
The cool mud squished between my fingers. It was so thick with chopped straw that I could pick it up by the handful to plaster the straw-bale wall of the house I was building. I mushed the mud into the bales with both hands, working it deep into the straw in a hypnotic, sensual cadence: Grab, mush. Grab, mush. Grab, mush.
The rhythm helped me ignore the exhaustion gnawing at me. A couple dozen friends had spent the day at our plaster party, helping us with the enormous job of mudding all the walls of the house my husband and I were building on our streamside land outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. All day, I hustled to keep everyone busy, teaching people to screen dirt and chop straw and mix mud, answering questions, running around with 35-pound buckets of mud in each hand to keep everyone supplied.
After all our friends had left, I gathered up the scraps of plaster left in various buckets and, despite my tiredness, gave myself this great pleasure of plastering a wall with my own hands. I reveled in the softness of the mud and the solidity of the bales—and the simplicity of a task with few decisions to make and no one else to satisfy.
I finished the wall faster than a crew of four of our friends would have. A couple years earlier, the Tewa Indian women who had taught me how to plaster had similarly outpaced me.
I stepped back from the wall, and a rush of awe filled me. That mud was now part of a wall that was destined, I hoped, to stand for decades, sheltering me from wind and cold. I imagined that someday my children would play in that spot, bumping against the wall, kept safe by its solidity. It seemed almost impossible that this seemingly endless series of mundane tasks would someday result in a house.
Once my job was done, my exhaustion wormed its way into my awareness—carrying my fear along with it. A couple of hours earlier, I had sent my husband, Geoff, inside for the evening, tired of telling him what to do. Please spray out the mixer. Please gather and wash the buckets. Please put away the screen. It was less painful to do it myself than to deal with his daze. Bits of Geoff’s soul seemed to be disappearing, nibbled away by bipolar disorder. As hard as I was working to construct our house, I couldn’t keep up with the destruction overtaking him—and us.
At one point recently, Geoff had come to me with eyes alight. “Look!” he said, handing me an eight-inch scrap of rebar, the material we had used to reinforce the concrete in our foundation. Rebar was ordinarily a dull, rusty brown rod, studded with bumps to help the concrete adhere to the steel—but the end of this piece was so smooth it felt soft against my finger, and blue and gray seemed to swirl inside the metal. Geoff held a file in his other hand, and metal dust lay at his feet. “It’s so shiny!” he said, in a five-year-old’s voice.
The wonder in his eyes nearly brought tears to mine. I hadn’t seen a moment of joy in him for months. If a shiny bit of metal could bring that back to him, could remind him that life had pleasures that made the fight against the depression worth it, that he wasn’t better off dead—well, it made me want to enshrine the thing on our mantelpiece.
At the same time, I wanted to bash the bit of rebar against his head: You just spent an hour filing a piece of trash while I’ve been working my ass off building our house, and you have no clue that’s a problem?
Even as I felt my anger billowing outward, though, I knew the force fueling it was fear—and grief. I missed my husband. Less than two years earlier, Geoff had been my stronger half as we had hauled railroad ties and shoveled concrete to build a bridge across our stream that was sturdy enough to hold a concrete truck. Before that, we had turned ourselves into mathematicians together, spending hour after hour discussing mathematical puzzles in cafés as students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I’d been dazzled by the way he could feel his way to the spine of a math problem and crack it; by the emotional maturity that helped him persist even when we were out of ideas; by his panther walk, honed by martial arts; and by the softness in his eyes whenever I was feeling down or discouraged.
If only I could talk to Geoff, the real Geoff, right now, I thought. He’d help me figure out how to deal with this mess. I counted the weeks since we’d last changed his medication, praying that the latest pills would bring him back to me.
I knew there was no point letting him see either my rage or my despair, so I forced myself to say, “That’s so cool, Geoff!” The pitch of my voice rose against my will, assuming a singsong bounce. “Now, think you could give me a hand for a minute?”
As I cleaned up after the plaster party these months later, worry about Geoff’s dissolution ate at my mind like acid. Would he ever be himself again? And even if he recovered, would our relationship recover too? Would we ever have the children I’d dreamed of? This house was supposed to be a jointly constructed container for our life as a couple and one day as a family. Instead, it was coming to be my personal burden. Our pain was getting built into it along with the straw and mud.
I pushed those worries aside, just as I had so many times before. Having finished plastering my wall, I went to rinse off my hands. As always, I was the dirtiest person on the building site at the end of the day. My arms seemed to have been dipped in chocolate up to the elbows, and I could feel dried mud cracking on my cheek. Bits of straw had cemented themselves to my legs. Long strands of blond hair straggled into my face, having snuck out of their braid. Most absurdly, two large, brown circles marked the front of my white T-shirt. How, I wondered, do I always manage to brush my breasts against a freshly plastered wall?
The next morning, Geoff and I awoke at dawn to make a run to town in Santa Fe, collecting supplies to keep the work going. I was exhausted, but then I was always exhausted, and I knew how to push through it.
When we got home, I stood and looked up the path to the house, sheltered by its great ponderosas. The slight slope felt like a mountain. My whole body ached, and earlier, just walking on the flat, even floors of Home Depot had hurt. When I groaned slightly at the first step, Geoff wrapped his arm around my waist and supported me up the slope. His brain might be dissolving, but his love for me still felt solid.
Even with Geoff’s help, walking up that slope felt like a cruel thing to demand of my body. I wanted to sag out of my husband’s embrace, to lie down in the pine needles, to feel my body melt into the soil. I just couldn’t do this. I couldn’t finish this house all by myself. I couldn’t go teach my summer class at the college the next day. I couldn’t keep Geoff from killing himself.
A worker we’d hired, Jessica, stood at the top of the slope, agape. “Were you up all night on a search?” she asked, her voice urgent and horrified. Geoff and I were both members of a search-and-rescue team, and over the previous couple of years, our pagers had often woken us in the night. We’d strap on our always-ready, fifty-pound rescue packs and hustle out the door to tromp through the wilderness hollering for some lost soul, often in the midst of a storm. But we’d both turned off our pagers many months ago, too busy with the work of building. Our backpacks were still packed, but they were buried under shovels and picks in a corner of the shed.
I stopped trudging up the path and looked at Jessica, astonished. Yesterday’s work isn’t enough to explain my appearance? I thought. To look this bad, I’d also need to have been up all night searching? But she had worked all day yesterday too, and she seemed fresh and ready for the day.
The pain and fatigue in my body spoke to me. It seemed to be saying something more than Stop. Rest. Lie down. A thought crept into my mind for the first time: Maybe I wasn’t just tired. Maybe I was sick.
Product details
- Publisher : Rodale Books (May 23, 2017)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1623367654
- ISBN-13 : 978-1623367657
- Item Weight : 1.14 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.8 x 1 x 8.7 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #254,103 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #65 in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome & Fibromyalgia
- #301 in Journalist Biographies
- #9,498 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Julie Rehmeyer is an award winning mathematics and science writer. She is a contributing editor to Discover Magazine, and has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Slate, Science News, High Country News, Aeon, and more. Her stories have been featured on The History Channel and NPR’s All Things Considered. She wrote mathematics columns for both Science News and Wired.
She did graduate work in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a fellowship from the National Science Foundation. She then taught math and the classics at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM. She has a certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the 2015-2016 recipient of Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism Fellow at The University of Colorado, Boulder and a 2015 Miller Journalism Fellow in Complexity Sciences at the Santa Fe Institute. In 2015 she was awarded the Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award from the American Statistical Association. Her work has been featured in Best American Mathematics Writing.
She lives in Santa Fe, NM, where she built her own straw-bale house, was a court-appointed special advocate for a foster teen, and ran a search and rescue team.
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Rehmeyer's account of the emotional devastation of grad school (she was studying mathematics at MIT before she, showing better sense than some of us, fled to New Mexico) will no doubt ring true for many academics, and, while most academics don't develop ME/CFS (although the number is probably higher than we currently know), the problem of mental and physical illnesses plaguing academics from the undergraduate level to full professors is starting to receive more and more press. While for me and for other academics this book may have some interest because of that angle, it is not, however, a story of academia gone wrong, as Rehmeyer goes from institutionally-affiliated academic to science writer fairly early on. She chronicles how she keeps thinking that, while she was haunted by the worry that something had gone fundamentally wrong with her body, it was all too easy, as she dealt with job and relationship worries, to assume that the problem was "just stress," something that her doctors encouraged her to think. If she could just clear this next hurdle and get her life in order, everything would be fine.
Except that it wasn't. Eventually Rehmeyer became so ill she could barely walk. Given a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome by the neurologist she consulted, she plunged into the maddening maelstrom of ME/CFS, where it seems like everyone, including most of the doctors who treat it, practices junk science. Is it a psychosomatic illness, the result of laziness and fearfulness, as many doctors characterized it? Rehmeyer's own experiences, like those of the majority of ME/CFS patients, strongly contradicted that. She writes about how she indeed assumed that she had merely gotten out of shape and unused to exercise, and dutifully attempted to build back up her strength, only for her gains to crumble away, so that she would end up even sicker than before. The treatments of the ME/CFS specialists she visited, although they did take it seriously as a physical illness, did little good either: supplements, special diets, and other treatments would occasionally bring about a brief improvement, only for her to collapse again. Interestingly, one of the things that brought about a fairly long-lasting remission early on in the illness was a trip abroad--I say interesting, because I experienced the same thing myself, although I went to Finland, while Rehmeyer went to South Africa. This certainly argues for an environmental cause, at least as part of the cocktail of triggers, for the illness; I don't know if anyone's researched the effects of leaving the country for ME/CFS patients, but I personally found that fascinating.
Anyway, nothing Rehmeyer did, not even after she consulted with some of the top specialists in the world, provided any long-term improvement. This led to a crisis, not just of physical health, but of her thinking; as she said:
"It was a hard thing for me to absorb: Doctors weren't going to help.
"It wasn't just that there was no magic pill to fix me. Plenty of other illnesses couldn't be fixed with magic pills--but at least they had legitimate specialists who would try to help. Chronic fatigue syndrome, it seemed, didn't count as a 'real' illness. The problem was less that people explicitly asserted that CFS was psychosomatic--my friends never said that, and only that one doctor I saw had discussed the possibility--and more that it lacked all the trappings of legitimacy, with proper doctors and blood tests and researchers and conferences and solid information on Web sites. If you told people you had cancer or multiple sclerosis or lupus, you got lots of sympathy. If you said you had chronic fatigue syndrome, you often heard, 'Oh yeah, I'm tired all the time too.'"
This led, through circuitous paths, to Rehmeyer turning away from "real" science, of which there is precious little on ME/CFS, and deciding to try out a hypothesis she originally considered to be crazy: that her problems were caused by exposure to toxic mold. The second half of the book is the story of her risky journey into Death Valley to attempt a "mold detox," followed by her growing realization that indeed, mold was the problem, and her subsequent attempts to avoid it.
This was the part of the book I was the most interested in before reading it, and the most skeptical about. I occasionally hear complaints about mold, and I'm always like, "Yeah, yeah, whatever" (eye roll). However, Rehmeyer's story is certainly a compelling argument that mold can indeed cause serious health problems, and that for at least some patients, it is a major factor in their illness. Which, as I eye the hole in my ceiling caused by the latest deluge here in the rainy Southeast, makes me very nervous. I'm not sure that I'm quite ready to try a mold detox, especially since it sounds like once you do, you have to be ready to get rid of all your possessions and flee to the desert, but reading this book has made me take the idea much more seriously.
This is not just a how-to manual for "treating your own CFS," though--in fact, it's not really that at all. It's much more an intellectual and spiritual journey through a little-understood, although not actually that rare, illness, as Rehmeyer teases out the problems with so many of the studies (she spends a while eviscerating the psychosomatic arguments, and in particular the PACE trials), and also contemplates the lessons she learns from being so ill for so long. To end with a few of her words:
"So much of the pain I experienced then was a result of outrage. I insisted that my suffering had to make sense, that I must be able to control it, that it must be an outcome of a mistake I'd made and would vanish once I corrected it. My rage grew out of my conviction that I had power in the situation, a belief that looked pretty silly now that I no longer had the ability to even lift my head. At this point, suffering felt like just one more experience to be attuned to, as valuable and welcome as joy or silliness or excitement, if far less fun. And I found that when I stopped resisting my suffering, I had more room for other things."
Indeed.
1. A medical mystery. Almost instantly, the reader gets hooked, determined to figure out what’s going on in Julie’s body and how she can get better.
2. An adventure story. You know the fun when a book takes you to places you’ve never been, all while making the stakes very, very high? That’s just what this book does. You’ll go to Death Valley (while wondering how Julie is going to make it out alive), you’ll meet Crazy Erik the Mold Warrior (and join Julie in wanting to clobber him over the head), you’ll even go into the crystal-bestrewn office of a psychic. And parts of the book read like a Stephen King horror novel, leaving you gasping and squirming.
3. An inspiring story of personal transformation. This book contains an enormous amount of wisdom that will expand your heart and make your experience of this world richer, more meaningful, more satisfying. Its stories will be rattling around in your mind and heart for weeks, months, years after finishing it.
4. A super-readable science book that never sits you down for a science lesson. You won’t be able to put down the science sections, even if you don’t ordinarily read about science. And even the science is multi-layered:
— It explains the science of chronic fatigue syndrome and mold illness. It’s been surprisingly hard to figure out what we actually know about these diseases, and some of the sources you’d expect to be reliable (like, say, the Mayo Clinic) are spewing unscientific misinformation. But Julie has the creds to convince you that her take on the science is rock-solid, even as she challenges some of the biggest names in science.
— An expose of the flaws in our system of scientific research. The book looks at these issues through the lens of chronic fatigue syndrome and mold illness, but it’s uncovering dynamics that go way beyond these particular illnesses. The reproducibility crisis in science is making scientists think hard about how reliable the scientific literature really is, and this book shows some of the reasons we can end up with highly-credentialed, good-looking crap for studies.
— A meditation on the nature of science and how we can make use of science in our own lives. Julie doesn’t just stop with decrying the flaws in our research system. Because she’s sick herself and is hell-bent on finding a solution, she asks, OK, what do we do now? She shows how she evaluated research, making use of the good and throwing out the bad, and even more, how she continued to think scientifically even as she was pushed beyond the bounds of the mainstream scientific understanding.
5. A practical life-saver. If you’re chronically ill, the information in this book may hugely improve your health. For one thing, it’s possible that mold is playing a role in your illness — we don’t know how many people are affected, but it’s quite plausibly a huge number. But even if mold has nothing to do with your illness, the book will help you take charge of your own health and give you strategies to find your own answers that work for your particular body.
6. A swooningly romantic, but totally real, love story. The love story is both super fun and satisfying — you’ll join the club of folks trying to figure out how to clone John — and it’s also inspiring. Julie couldn’t have had the kind of relationship she built with John if she hadn’t gone through all the torture along the way. It’ll leave you with a stirring vision of what love can be and what it takes to get it.
And a bonus #7: The most thoughtful meditation on the relationship between spirituality and science I've ever read.
Top reviews from other countries
Not only has the book explained a great deal to me and increased my awareness of ME, it was pleasurable to read. Despite the author's health difficulties, her grace and beauty are communicated alongside her experiences, such that it was good to 'be in her company'. Her descriptions of life in some stunning areas of America were also engaging and inspiring.
I hope that this story is widely read. I really do.
Für jeden zu empfehlen, bei dem sich gelegentlich Unsicherheit oder Unzufriedenheit mit Teilen seines (oder ihres) Lebens einstellt. Schärft den Blick und hilft der optimistisch orientierten Komponente des Ichs, hier korrigierens einzugrreifen.
Allerdings empfanden wir das Buch schon sehr schwer und haben es wohl daher nie fertig gelesen...
I have to be honest: I was a little sceptic. Molds? Molds? Molds might in some people be the trigger for ME? I do have a 'Master of Science' and really thought this whole mold/ enviromental stuff was something you hardly could take serious. Geez, did I have a lot of prejudice (and am I feeling ashamed about that now)! I am known with the fact that ME is a severe immun/neurological multi system disease. I am known with all the stigma (because of bad science: PACE-trial) around the disease, but I had no idea that there is a similar story about bad and wrong science to tell about molds.
Read the book.
It is not only very informative, but also a pleasure to read (despite the big drama of having ME).
The book really gives you a very strong idea about what it is about, to live each day with ME. The writers positivism during the whole book is remarkable and honorable. Being that alone and that brave! It's a book about living when life is not more than surviving. This book is about making a difference, when 'making' something at all, seems not longer to be possible anymore.








