When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the emergency room in Merced, California, she was diagnosed as an epileptic. Lia's parents were part of a large Hmong community, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos, holding traditional beliefs that illnesses have a spiritual cause. Lia's pediatricians cleaved just as strongly to the tradition of Western medicine. In this winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, Anne Fadiman recounts how Lia Lee's story became a tragic case of cultural miscommunication.