RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
Winter 2003  

Book Reviews
Your guide to published resources

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Christianity & Culture: Between God and an Illness.
By James M. Rotholz, PhD. 2002, Hayworth Medical Press, $17.95, 141 pp.
Review by Nina Bunin

Do you think that seeing is believing, or that believing is seeing?

This is not a trick question — it’s a question about our attitude towards fact versus faith. And it is never more relevant than to people with CFIDS (PWCs) and others with chronic illnesses, questioning our faith and developing a new life-view that allows us to be at peace with CFIDS.

In his new book, Rotholz addresses this issue through his own lens of Christian faith. It is a faith severely challenged and ultimately rekindled as a result of CFIDS.

A former anthropologist, Rotholz explores what it means to be “outside” the widely held norms of success, power and achievement. Disability forces us to closely examine Western society’s definitions of what our goals should be versus how they are defined in more “primitive” cultures and what they are as laid out in the Bible. He makes it quite clear exactly how bankrupting to the soul our commonly held way of thinking about these issues can be.

These are the issues that any person with chronic illness explores as we delve deeply into the connection between mind, body and spirit, when we must decide on a daily basis what our highest priorities really are and as we search for a framework (either an existing one such as religion, or one created in our own hearts) of belief, faith and hope.

This book is very much a journey of the heart. Forced by CFIDS to re-examine every part of himself and the world around him, Rotholz writes with clarity and conviction about the “gift” of CFIDS, mixed blessing that it is. Although Rotholz embraces the faith of Christianity in particular, anyone seriously examining these issues and looking for insights on achieving peace and faith within oneself will find it a worthwhile read.

Stricken: Voices from the Hidden Epidemic of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Edited by Peggy Munson. 2000, The Hayworth Press, $24.95, 270 pp.
Review by Sue Garrott

“Stricken” presents the stories of seriously ill people of all ages, told through their poetry, journal entries and short essays. The authors write of the debilitating symptoms of CFIDS, about their pain and anger, and of the emotional losses they face.

Their stories speak to the lack of acknowledgement of their illness, and to the trivialization and ridicule of their symptoms. The writers detail their struggles to find medical care; to gain financial help through Social Security or long-term disability plans; and to cope with the breakdown of their social networks, as friends and even family members question their illness.

This book is well organized and researched. It presents information that many people may not know, such as how the illness got its name, how the CDC selected the symptoms necessary for diagnosis and much more. One chapter, “The Paradox of Lost Fingerprints: Metaphor and Shaming of Chronic Syndrome,” expresses anger about the politics and negation of CFIDS.

I liked this book, particularly the stories of how people are coping with the losses in their lives. The “Paradox” chapter was the most difficult to read; it contains important information but that anger also seems consuming.