ALL IN MY HEAD: An Epic Quest To Cure An Unrelenting, Totally Unreasonable, and Only Slightly Enlightening Headache | Paula Kamen
Kamen is a dogged researcher, and she peppers her discursive story with information gleaned from the other “tired girls” she’s met and interviewed along the way, as well as sidebars detailing everything from off-label drug use to trepanation. By the end of 318 pages she slowly, grudgingly comes to realize that, as the 12-step mantra goes, peace may well come from accepting that which she cannot change. Adopting a patchwork approach to pain relief that could serve as a prescription for all manner of existential ailments, she takes solace where she can find it: a little acupuncture, a little Tavist-D, a little Buddhist detachment, a little cable TV.
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Where: Barbara’s Bookstore, 1218 S. Halsted
Arriving as it did in January, right in the middle of America’s annual Calvinist recoil from holiday excess, Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession provides welcome distraction in the form of a blessedly evenhanded and wide-ranging 14-essay anthology. This fascinating, thoughtful book pushes past our usual cultural retreads of “fat” by opening the word to a wide range of contexts and meanings. Fat includes essays about fat pornography (straight and gay), Spam, plastic surgery in Brazil, self-deluding coffee orders at Starbucks (according to Margaret Willson’s essay, people ask for skim milk and then doctor their drinks with cream from the thermos), a regional Italian delicacy of cured lard, the late rapper Big Pun and other fat icons of hip-hop, olive oil, and a Portuguese saint who gained holy status by subsisting solely on communion wafers–among others.
As the boyfriend of a PWA, Bill Hayes gets a lot of mileage out of his mate’s immunodeficiency. He’s forever going on about the poor guy’s blood tests, his meds, and his trips to the doctor–of which Hayes has never missed one, he notes up front. Just as Hayes’s chronic insomnia does for his 2001 memoir on the subject, Sleep Demons, his fella’s disease gives street cred to this book’s mostly interesting digressions on sanguinary history and science. These can be condensed into just over two pages–and they are, in the press materials that came with the book. Hayes’s publicist seems to know better than his editor what a bloodthirsty public wants. What Hayes stresses instead, and goes on for most of the book about, could be represented by a much smaller list:
