First off, I received a copy of this book through the Early Reviewers program on LibraryThing. I'm grateful to the publisher for the copy of this; I read an ARC, and so some aspects may have changed in the course of publishing.

This book interesting series of meditations on migraine and pain. Olstein draws cultural objects from all over--poets and writers, House, M.D., art, etc. I think some of her interactions with those objects falls kind of short for me--the book itself is not, obviously, a true cultural history in the academic sense of migraine, but it feels a little pulled thin as she tries to create essentially migraine as a kind of epistemology but never really coming to any real stance on it, which is fine since that's not necessarily her aim.

The biggest weakness of the text for me is the lack of engagement with disability studies, or the question of disability at all. I'm not sure if Olstein considers herself disabled, and she seems resistant to considering the question in any serious capacity, preferring to take the pain as its own thing. I just think addressing some of the questions that disability studies has posed about pain (I'm thinking especially the work of Tobin Siebers in Disability Theory around pain, which touches on much of what Olstein writes about here but also extends beyond it in ways I find productive,) or at least acknowledging that thought might really have enriched this.