The paradox of hope : journeys through a clinical borderland / Cheryl Mattingly.

Grounded in intimate moments of family life in and out of hospitals, The Paradox of Hope focuses on a group of African American families in a multicultural urban environment, many of them poor and all of them with children who have serious chronic medical conditions. Depicting the urban hospital as a border zone where race, class, and chronic disease intersect, Cheryl Mattingly describes communities of care that span both clinic and family to show how and why hope is created as an everyday reality amid trying circumstances. Her highly readable, theoretically innovative study proposes a narrative phenomenology of practice as it explores these rich case stories.