A stroke of genius

Like Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor, West trains the telescope of disease on a larger picture. Luckily for his readers, his symptoms have served to whet a riotous imagination that steadfastly refuses to be dampened by even the direst of trials. In a manic search for order and meaning, he muses over hospital minutiae, the aloofness of doctors, Proust, Milton, existentialism, Coumadin and Inderal, pacemaker lore, the comedies of air travel, ersatz coffee, red-eye writing stints, and the enigma of his biological clock. "Each day is a pageant, an experiment," he writes. A Stroke of Genius is a rhapsody on the mystery of health and a newfound awareness that is the hard-earned gift of chronic illness.