RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
Fall 2003 

Book Reviews
Your guide to published resources

Handbook of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Edited by Leonard A. Jason, Patricia A. Fennell and Renee R. Taylor, 2003, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., $90, 794 pp.

Written by a virtual Who’s Who of CFIDS researchers, clinicians and patients, the Handbook touches on every aspect of the CFIDS experience — from assessment, treatment and symptomatology to patient perspectives. While it does not break new ground in terms of research or patient care, the book serves as a comprehensive primer. Although it’s written with health-care professionals in mind, astute lay readers should find the Handbook an enlightening guide.

If You Would Just Get Out of Bed: My Life with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
By Stephanie Kelly
2003, KK Bell LLC $12.95, http://www.ifyouwouldjust.com

This book starts with a victory — the author’s wedding day. And it ends with hopeful words from a person who has learned to cope with the illness that has dogged her for nearly 20 years. In between lay the personal tales familiar to so many people with CFIDS — the daily struggles to accomplish the smallest tasks, the insensitive comments of people unfamiliar with the toll CFIDS exacts, the lingering doubts if life will ever improve.

Kelly’s message is realistic but upbeat. "My internal battle is quieting, and my soul and spirit are winning more often," Kelly writes. "…whether it is in sickness or health, I look forward to every day."

Previously published book reviews and a list of online books are available on The CFIDS Associationof America’s Web site. Click on http://www.cfids.org/about-cfids/book-list.asp.

Interested in writing book reviews for the Chronicle? Contact the editor at The CFIDS Association of America, P.O. Box 220398, Charlotte, NC 28222-0398, or online at chronicle@cfids.org.

The CFIDS Bookshelf
By Dorothy Wall

The list of books written by people with CFIDS (PWCs) about their experience is growing rapidly, particularly as electronic formats and self-publishing become easier. This is a list of a few of the best books by PWCs published by major publishers. Not how-to-cope or informational books, these are stories and investigations that take readers inside the CFIDS world, the illness, the politics, the day-to-day struggles.

Floyd Skloot, In the Shadow of Memory (University of Nebraska, 2003). Like his previous work, The Night Side: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and the Illness Experience, this is a collection of award-winning essays and poems, personal, moving and humorous, giving a graphic account of how CFIDS impacts a life.

Susan Griffin, What Her Body Thought: A Journey into the Shadows (Harper San Francisco, 1999). Griffin confronts economic, social and philosophical aspects of illness in a ruminative, interwoven tale of her experience with CFIDS, her childhood memories, her journal entries, and the story of Marie Duplessis, popularized as the fictional Camille, a 19th-century courtesan who died of tuberculosis.

Lynn Sharon Schwartz, The Fatigue Artist (New York: Simon and Schuster). The only novel written about CFIDS, this is a stellar book by an acclaimed novelist that paints the CFIDS experience with humor and honesty.

Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (New York: Routledge, 1996). Written by a PWC, this book explores how our culture defines and understands disability, the way the authority of the medical establishment shapes the illness experience, and how we can both embrace and transcend the body that suffers.

Dorothy Wall is co-author of Finding Your Writer’s Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction (St. Martin’s Press), and is completing a collection of essays about CFIDS.