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  • The Empathy Exams

  • Essays
  • By: Leslie Jamison
  • Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
  • Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
  • 3.9 out of 5 stars (11 ratings)

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The Empathy Exams

By: Leslie Jamison
Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
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Summary

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize

A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain - real and imagined, her own and others' - Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory - from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration - in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.

©2014 Leslie Jamison (P)2015 Audible Inc.
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Something weird about the reading

Great essays but jarringly read. Leslie Jamison is a sublime writer so this is feels disrespectful to her work to be mainly focussing on the delivery. But….There was something a bit robotic so I even looked up the VO woman to check that she’s a real person. She is… but I can’t help wondering if she’s lent her voice to an AI and just tweaked a bit at the end. There’s a lack of humanity in the voice and I feel that it doesn’t do the work justice. Wondering if anyone else has noticed or whether I’m just a mad person, distracted from the vulnerability of the words by the nagging sensation that the next word might sound like AI?

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