Felstiner brings a feminist's eye and a historian's tool kit to this narrative of her decades-long struggle with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a crippling autoimmune disease that afflicts more than two million Americans. Felstiner (
To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era), a professor of history at San Francisco State University, traces the growing scientific understanding of RA, from the earliest accounts in medical antiquity to the latest theories of how pregnancy might trigger the disorder. She touches on treatments, from antimalarial drugs through cortisone and the now-blackballed painkiller Vioxx. Part of the American Lives Series, edited by Tobias Wolff, Felstiner's memoir suffers at times from self-indulgent prose and tiresome metaphors. Yet the book's total effect is powerful, and her major chords strike true: RA is a devastatingly disabling condition with steep private and public costs; its disproportionate effects on women have not been adequately addressed; its social, political and interpersonal implications are significant. In the end, Felstiner's story is as much about the complexities of belonging;as a woman, a feminist, a Jew, an intellectual;as it is about her illness. So it has something to discover for any reader, pained joints or otherwise. 10 b&w photos.
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Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
Although I had intended to read Out of Joint slowly, chapter by chapter, once I began the momentum built until I stayed up extremely late one night to finish it. It is a gorgeous, haunting, painful, exhilarating, breathtaking book, and one that is as much poetry as powerful analysis. This is a deeply courageous book, one willing to stay inside the pain and the joints---I felt almost as if I were right in there, almost inside this body. The book conveys that bodily presence so beautifully, it is quite amazing. It also conveys both movement and stasis, a sense of the endlessness of pain, but through it all the movements of the author's mind, as she explored different facets of it, and in many different sites--library, clinic, home, mountainside, street, office, and classroom. I felt as if I were traveling along with her, on a sort of Pilgrim's Progress, on a quest, even if there is no ultimate resolution, though there are moments of release and exultation. This will become a classic text, not just about arthritis but about writing, and about memoir, and about the body. I hope it will be read widely everywhere. Many thanks for writing such a wise and generous and sensuous book, one that, even in the darkness, is full of light!
