Bowdoin
Community Read
The first open online book talk
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
8:00 p.m.
bowdoin.edu
Join other alumni, students, faculty, staff, parents, and others in a discussion of Anne Fadiman’s 
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall  Down, moderated by Susan Bell, A. Myrick Freeman Professor of 
Social Sciences and chair of the sociology and anthropology
department and Stephen Loebs ’60, research associate at the Joseph McKeen Center for the Common 
Good and professor emeritus, College of Public Health, The Ohio State
University. Author Anne Fadiman will join the conversation by phone and field questions.
The talk will be streamed live on Bowdoin’s website starting at 8:00 p.m. During the talk, viewers 
will be able to e-mail questions to Fadiman and the moderators to participate.
Follow the discussion on Twitter with
#spiritcatchesyou
For more information go to
bowdoin.edu for details as the date approaches. Sponsored by the Joseph McKeen Center for the 
Common Good and the Office of the Dean for Academic Affairs.

“The book explores the clash between
a small county hospital in California
and a refugee family from Laos over
the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong child
diagnosed with severe epilepsy. Lia’s
parents and her doctors both wanted
what was best for Lia, but the lack of
understanding between them led to
tragedy. Winner of the National Book
Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction,
the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for
Current Interest, and the Salon Book
Award, Anne Fadiman’s compassionate
account of this cultural impasse is
literary journalism at its finest.”
—Amazon.com