About this item
Julie Rehmeyer felt like she was going to the desert to die.Julie fully expected to be breathing at the end of the trip - but driving into Death Valley felt like giving up, surrendering. Shed spent years battling a mysterious illness so extreme that she often couldnt turn over in her bed. The top specialists in the world were powerless to help, and research on her disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, was at a near standstill. Having exhausted the plausible ideas, Julie turned to an implausible one. Going against both her instincts and her training as a science journalist and mathematician, she followed the advice of strangers shed met on the Internet. Their theory - that mold in her home and possessions was making her sick - struck her as wacky pseudoscience. But they had recovered from chronic fatigue syndrome as severe as hers.To test the theory that toxic mold was making her sick, Julie drove into the desert alone, leaving behind everything she owned. She wasnt even certain she was well enough to take care of herself once she was there. She felt stripped not only of the life shed known, but any future she could imagine.With only her scientific savvy, investigative journalism skills, and dog, Frances, to rely on, Julie carved out her own path to wellness - and uncovered how shocking scientific neglect and misconduct had forced her and millions of others to go it alone. In stunning prose, she describes how her illness transformed her understanding of science, medicine, and spirituality. Through the Shadowlands brings scientific authority to a misunderstood disease and spins an incredible and compelling story of tenacity, resourcefulness, acceptance, and love.
About the Author
Julie Rehmeyer is an award winning mathematics and science writer. She is a contributing editor to Discover Magazine, and has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Slate, Science News, High Country News, Aeon, and more. Her stories have been featured on The History Channel and NPR's All Things Considered. She wrote mathematics columns for both Science News and Wired.
She did graduate work in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a fellowship from the National Science Foundation. She then taught math and the classics at St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM. She has a certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the 2015-2016 recipient of Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism Fellow at The University of Colorado, Boulder and a 2015 Miller Journalism Fellow in Complexity Sciences at the Santa Fe Institute. In 2015 she was awarded the Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award from the American Statistical Association. Her work has been featured in Best American Mathematics Writing.
She lives in Santa Fe, NM, where she built her own straw-bale house, was a court-appointed special advocate for a foster teen, and ran a search and rescue team.
