The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease - Softcover

Thomas Larson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0976881381 ISBN 13: 9780976881384

Publisher: Hudson Whitman, 2014

Synopsis

We all know someone who has suffered a heart attack. But how often do we learn the intimate, potentially life-saving details that accompany coronary disease? In The Sanctuary of Illness, Thomas Larson The Memoir and the Memoirist; The Saddest Music Ever Written gives a powerful and personal inside tour of what happens when our arteries fail. He chronicles the three heart attacks in five years that he survived, and the emergency surgeries that saved his life each time. Slowly waking up to the genetic legacy and dangerous diet that pushed him to the brink, he reveals a path to healing that he and his partner, Suzanna, discovered together. Told with urgency and sensitivity, The Sanctuary of Illness is a subtle reminder that heart disease seldom affects just one heart.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"Written in the tradition of Sherwin Nuland and Anatole Broyard, Thomas Larson's The Sanctuary of Illness is both a meditation on mortality and a call to arms in the face of the inevitable. By turns defiant, humorous, earthy, and literary, the work is a felicitous mix of memoir and reporting: the heart as a pulsing source of both truth and fact." --Madeleine Blais, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

"Thomas Larson has written a sumptuous and insightful personal chronicling of the pathway into and away from coronary artery disease." --Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, "Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease"

"In the realm of fear and suffering and grief there must be poetry, and Larson finds it again and again in this memoir. His clarity, his humility, and his grace are profoundly moving." --Richard Hoffman, Half the House

"This powerful book conveys one man's struggle fighting heart disease. Thomas Larson describes multiple heart attacks, interventions, and his decision to try to change his fate with a plant-based diet. His example and dramatic rebound are truly inspiring." --Neal Barnard, M.D.¸ featured in the film, "Forks Over Knives."

"The Sanctuary of Illness—a model of the memoirist's art—feels like an instrument of personal discovery and healing. Intimate, searching, vivid, Larson's story is also a cautionary tale that if heeded might prolong your life." -- Richard Gilbert, Shepherd: A Memoir

About the Author:

Journalist, book/music critic, and memoirist Thomas Larson is the author of Spirituality and the Writer: A Personal Inquiry (Swallow Press). He has also written The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease (Hudson Whitman), The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" (Pegasus Press), and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative (Swallow Press). He is a twenty-year staff writer for the San Diego Reader, a six-year book review editor for River Teeth, and a former music critic for the Santa Fe New Mexican.

His Kindle books include What Exactly Happened: Four Essays on the Craft of Memoir, We Are Their Heaven: A Family Memoir, On the Poetry of James Wright, and Awash in Celebrity Authors.

As a lecturer, Larson speaks about his book on heart disease, holdsworkshops on "Writing the Memoir" and "The Spiritual Memoir," editsnonfiction manuscripts, and gives talks on heart disease, jazz, American composers, and nonfiction narrative.

His website isthomaslarson.com. When not on the road or spending time in Santa Fe,Larson lives with his partner Suzanna Neal in San Diego.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hudson Whitman
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0976881381
• ISBN 13: 9780976881384
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144