Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
Barbara Ehrenreich
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
Barbara Ehrenreich
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
With a scientist’s keen eye, Ehrenreich precisely explains the intricacies of the immune system. She’s equally at home in other disciplines, too, moving seamlessly from biology and philosophy to history and poetry. Her book is richly layered with evidence, stories and quotations from all of these disciplines and sprinkled with barbed humor. Ehrenreich lets nobody off the hook, skewering Silicon Valley meditators and misogynist obstetricians with equal vigor..
Her new book is blunt: Nothing in modern life prepares us for the leaving of it.
You can’t begrudge Ehrenreich her effort to assuage our and her own fears about mortality, even if her historical chapters sometimes read like freshman surveys.
While an impressive display of erudition, Natural Causes brings something far rarer to the discussion of aging in print: a sense of humor. Ehrenreich is a very funny companion on the aging 'journey,' especially when sharing her own experiences and conflicts.
Ehrenreich compares doctors’ examinations to rituals that serve as much to cement the social order and the authority of physicians as they do to advance healing. For women in particular, physical exams have historically been invasive and frequently humiliating, and often with unproven results.
Like most polemicists, Ehrenreich is more persuasive when on the attack than when it comes to offering solutions. There is a lot in her book to take issue with: the impatient dismissal of mindfulness, for instance, and the paranoid interpretation of the anti-smoking lobby as “a war against the working class”. Even her essential premise is flawed: yes, death can come even to those who have worked hard at staying healthy, but that’s a given and doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort. And then there’s her animus against gyms, as the locus of a pampered, narcissistic, middle-class elite, when she continues to attend one. Still, she is one of our great iconoclasts, lucid, thought-provoking and instructive, never more so than here. That PhD in cellular immunology, left behind while she went on to write books and run campaigns, has proved useful after all..
Natural Causes is not a Grand Unified Theory of How We Live Life Now; it is Ehrenreich’s reflection on how she has lived her own extraordinarily productive life. The best parts draw their force from her institutional knowledge, her experience of medicine and wellness from the 1950s to the present, and even her grudges. Her theories are so convincing and her prose so captivating because she herself saw the events that contoured wellness culture into its 21st-century shape. To decenter herself and her body from that narrative would have been to write an entirely different book..
In Natural Causes, she brandishes her stiletto against the body of evidence behind the contemporary wellness movement and leaves a rather bloodied carcass in her wake.
Ms. Ehrenreich finds reasons to doubt our faith in Western 'rituals' of medical examinations, expensive wellness regimens and a glut of evidence-poor tests—bemoaning precious time spent trying, uselessly, to prevent all manner of ailment.
At first glance, her new book, Natural Causes, is a polemic against wellness culture and the institutions that sustain it. What makes the argument unusual is its embrace of that great humbler, the end of life.
Like Bright-Sided, Natural Causes was inspired by a particular moment in Ehrenreich’s life: her acceptance of her own mortality. But that moment gives way to a broader inquiry into the biological, social, and political implications of the American denial of death. In fact, one reason the book is so compelling is that Ehrenreich moves fluidly back and forth between discussing our physical limitations, our social and political limitations, and the relationship between the two. Ehrenreich begins with microscopic observations of cell behavior to paint a detailed yet accessible picture of the body in conflict with itself.
This book is joyous. It is neither anti-medicine nor anti-prevention; it is pro-balance, pro-scepticism and pro-perspective. And it asks us to show a little humility.
Each of these early chapters could be a book, and in the name, perhaps, of moving things along, sometimes Ehrenreich attempts a rhetorical knockout punch.
Ehrenreich is well equipped for her mission; she has a doctorate in biology and years of social and political work behind her, as well as decades of writing.
Ehrenreich, who holds a PhD in cellular immunology, offers a healthy dose of reformist philosophy combined with her trademark investigative journalism. In assessing our quest for a longer, healthier life, Ehrenreich provides a contemplative vision of an active, engaged health care that goes far beyond the physical restraints of the body and into the realm of metaphysical possibilities..
The author has a doctorate in cellular immunology, and throughout the text, she employs the erudition that earned her degree, the social consciousness that has long informed her writing, and the compassion that endears her to her many fans.
That this knowledgable book arrives in the context of an urgent American healthcare crisis, when many people can’t access or afford healthcare, may irritate some readers. Still, Ehrenreich’s sharp intelligence and graceful prose make this book largely pleasurable reading..