Advance Praise:
“Swallow is a surprising and original work. It is biography on the slant, a meditation that transcends boundaries and genres, written with scholarship, humor, and panache. I urge you to take this journey.”
“A warm and thoroughly researched portrait.”
—The Washington Post
“Cappello … brings a psychoanalytic richness to her understanding of ingestion and dentition.”
—The Guardian
“[Cappello] packs her story with surprising imagery and extravagant lyricism, taking a highly literary approach on the subject.”
—Salon
“One odd, and oddly haunting, book.”
—Macleans
—Ricky Jay
“I was astonished and delighted—grabbed by the throat, indeed—by this most remarkable book, which took me down a thousand little red lanes, and laid out in excruciating and fascinating detail all those myriad of items—corks to safety pins to draughts of lye and three-foot swords—that have managed to pass down there too. It is a wonderful and bizarre book: gorge yourself on it, and gulp.”
“I was astonished and delighted—grabbed by the throat, indeed—by this most remarkable book, which took me down a thousand little red lanes, and laid out in excruciating and fascinating detail all those myriad of items—corks to safety pins to draughts of lye and three-foot swords—that have managed to pass down there too. It is a wonderful and bizarre book: gorge yourself on it, and gulp.”
—Simon Winchester, author of Atlantic: The Biography of an Ocean
“Swallow is a wonderful, intriguing book, a fascinating glimpse into a true medical pioneer and a life’s work. Mary Cappello delves into what it means to ingest things we weren’t meant to eat, and how the line between our bodies and foreign bodies can sometimes blur. Every object tells a story, and the stories here are marvelous.”
“Swallow is a wonderful, intriguing book, a fascinating glimpse into a true medical pioneer and a life’s work. Mary Cappello delves into what it means to ingest things we weren’t meant to eat, and how the line between our bodies and foreign bodies can sometimes blur. Every object tells a story, and the stories here are marvelous.”
—Colin Dickey, author of Crankiolepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius
Swallow
Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them
paperback
$18.95
Now in paperback: A revelatory, poetic exploration of swallowing—and of a strange collection of objects preserved by a single-minded medical pioneer
Each of us has at least one formative swallow, one out-of-the-ordinary episode at the threshold of the mouth that made us who we are.
—From Swallow
—From Swallow
In this fascinating and lyrical book, the seemingly disparate but equally marvelous worlds of the circus and the medical amphitheater meet in characters ranging from the sword swallowers and women who lunched on hardware to the sensitive, bullied boy who grew up to be the father of endoscopy. The Mütter Museum’s Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection, a cabinet filled with thousands of items that have been swallowed or inhaled, then extracted nonsurgically by a pioneering laryngologist using rigid instruments of his own design, sets the stage for award-winning author Mary Cappello’s moving investigative portrait of Dr. Chevalier Jackson (1865-1958), his cosmology of objects, and the lives he saved. Its own uncanny, deeply rewarding assemblage, Swallow brings together the complex physiology of the human swallow and the menace of a button box; a willed ingestion of non-nutritive things that is little understood and a social history of hunger; the humanitarian mission that bred the Federal Caustic Poison Act of 1927 and a crusade to make the world “foreign body conscious.”
Mary Cappello is the author of Awkward (a Los Angeles Times bestseller), Called Back, and Night Bloom. A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination, and the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, she teaches at the University of Rhode Island and lives in Providence.
For more about Swallow, see www.swallowthebook.com
For more about Swallow, see www.swallowthebook.com
Spring 2012
paperback
5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 304 pages
978-1-59558-777-0
paperback
5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 304 pages
978-1-59558-777-0
Other Editions:
For overseas orders, please contact your local representative from our
Sales & Distribution page.