The Empathy Exams: Essays - Leslie Jamison

Jamison's critical thinking and awareness are relentless here. Her ability to exhaust all emotional and social angles involved in the wide-ranging, extreme circumstances she relates - and to do so in such an approachable way - is a testament to her intellect. As a result, it's easy to get hung up on a particularly profound paragraph, then realize you have no idea what happened on the subsequent page or two. Go back and read them again. There's probably another profundity hidden in there as well. So much so that at some point you should expect to come across a passage that nails you better than you could do yourself. It's startling in the best possible way.