Synopses & Reviews
Jon Ronson meets David Grann: a fascinating, wildly entertaining adventure and travel story about how culture can make us go totally insane.
The Geography of Madness is an investigation of "culture-bound" syndromes, which are far stranger than they sound. Why is it, for example, that some men believe, against all reason, that vandals stole their penises, even though they’re in good physical shape? In The Geography of Madness, acclaimed magazine writer Frank Bures travels around the world to trace culture-bound syndromes to their sources – and in the process, tells a remarkable story about the strange things all of us believe.
Review
"Frank Bures has some of the widest (and wildest) curiosities of any writer out there. This is a man who truly wants to know the world, in all its strange and beautiful variations. He is fearless in his reporting, generous in his spirit, and brilliant in his prose. I would follow him anywhere." Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
Review
"What Bures has achieved here is a complex, nuanced and original meditation on our species and how we manage to coexist on a planet where we are all the same, yet each so different." The Australian
Review
"It would be easy just to gawk at the strangeness of these syndromes, or to dismiss them as unscientific or psychosomatic. Bures doesn’t do that. He carefully considers the relationships between culture, health, the mind, and the body, which can lead people to experience seemingly impossible things." The Atlantic
Synopsis
Why do some men become convinced--despite what doctors tell them--that their penises have, simply, disappeared. Why do people across the world become convinced that they are cursed to die on a particular date--and then do? Why do people in Malaysia suddenly "run amok"?
In The Geography of Madness, acclaimed magazine writer Frank Bures investigates these and other "culture-bound" syndromes, tracing each seemingly baffling phenomenon to its source. It's a fascinating, and at times rollicking, adventure that takes the reader around the world and deep into the oddities of the human psyche. What Bures uncovers along the way is a poignant and stirring story of the persistence of belief, fear, and hope.
About the Author
Frank Bures’s stories have appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, Outside, Bicycling, Wired and have been included in a number of Best American Travel Writing anthologies. They’ve also been selected as "Notable" picks for Best American Sports Writing 2012 and the Best American Essays 2013. He speaks several languages, has lived in countries around the world, and currently lives in Minneapolis.
Frank Bures on PowellsBooks.Blog
In August of 1984 on the Island of Hainan in southern China, a fortune teller predicted “1985 would be a bad year and that all of the people would suffer from many disasters,” according to a report later published by the Guangzhou Brain Hospital, which I found while researching my book
The Geography of Madness...
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