The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering »

Melanie Thernstrom is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and the author of The Dead Girl and Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder.

Both a personal meditation and an intellectual exploration, The Pain Chronicles illuminates and makes sense of the all-too-human experience of pain—-and confronts with extraordinary grace and empathy its peculiar traits, its harrowing effects, and its various antidotes.

The New York Times Book Review - Robin Romm

…an expansive, invigorating mix of medical reportage, history, memoir and cultural criticism. Thernstrom's passion and intellectual curiosity are infectious. At times, she is the literary critic, contextualizing our relationship to pain through Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, Emily Dickinson and the Bible…At other times, she is a fiercely knowledgeable science writer, delivering case studies and research findings with a story teller's verve…The Pain Chronicles is…a sophisticated, elegantly compiled treatise—as wide-ranging, complex and defiant as pain itself.