"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 Bronte, 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.
- ISBN10 1844881342
- ISBN13 9781844881345
- Publish Date 3 September 2009
- Publish Status Unknown
- Out of Print 11 June 2011
- Publish Country IE
- Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Imprint Penguin Ireland
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 288
- Language English