For the November installment of Yale Library’s Book Talk Series, author Meghan O’Rourke will be in conversation with Ross Douthat to discuss O’Rourke’s new book “The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness,” a National Book Award finalist.

Drawing on her own medical experiences as well as a decade of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, O’Rourke traces the history of Western definitions of illness, and reveals how inherited ideas of cause, diagnosis, and treatment have led us to ignore a host of hard-to-understand medical conditions, ones that resist easy description or simple cures. And as America faces this health crisis of extraordinary proportions, the populations most likely to be neglected by our institutions include women, the working class, and people of color.

O’Rourke is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Nonfiction Award, the May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes. At Yale, she is the Editor of The Yale Review, and teaches classes on the art of editing and public writing. Ross Douthat is a past senior fellow (2020-21) at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, and co-host of the Times op-ed podcast “The Argument.”

For information about future events, subscribe to the Yale Library Book Talk mailing list through the link above.