Self-diagnosis

In 2003, James McManus found himself alone in a Minnesota hotel room, watching Aljazeera news, interrupted only by frequent and harrowing escapes to the bathroom. It was all in the name of a job.

McManus had accepted an assignment from Harper's Magazine to undergo the "executive physical"—an expensive and exhaustive checkup—at the famed Mayo Clinic. At 52, with a habit of having a few drinks each night, and a fistful of relatives who died early, McManus put aside his reluctance to see doctors and prepped himself for everything from EKGs to a colonoscopy (hence the laxative that sent him scurrying mid-broadcast). Aside from giving McManus a relatively clean bill of health, the experience became the launchpad for his new book, Physical: An American Checkup, an almost unclassifiable work that covers everything from the health effects of smoking weed to the vagaries of stem-cell research.

"Two of my favorite nonfiction writers, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, felt free to digress," says McManus, a professor of creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. McManus talked to us over the phone, before returning to the Vegas tables for a poker tournament. "If I'm going to write about quitting smoking, I like to go way back and look at why we like to smoke at all."

McManus made it big in 2003 with another book that sprung from a Harper's assignment,Positively Fifth Street—a recounting of his entry into the 2000 World Series of Poker. It hit at just the right time, when the Texas hold 'em craze was just whipping up. Also delightfully discursive, Fifth Street made McManus into something of a poker authority, and he's now at work on a history of the game. However, he doesn't see Physical bringing him the same sort of anointed expertise. "That would be very strange," he says. "I know a lot more about poker than the average person, but while I know a fair amount now about stem-cell research, I'm far from an expert. But who the hell knows what will happen? I'm happy to talk about my feelings."

His feelings, as it turns out, are a big part of Physical. In the first half, when discussing the various tests he underwent at the Mayo Clinic and the dietary and lifestyle changes the results mandated, McManus often worries about his ability to heed and adhere to the doctors' warnings. With a wife and two small children, he has a vested interest in staying alive for a long time. Likewise, his 29-year-old daughter, Bridget, suffers from juvenile diabetes, a fact that informs much of the book.

In the second half, as McManus dips into stem-cell research—the use of embryonic cells to replace diseased or destroyed tissue—he goes head-to-head with Leon Kass, chair of the President's Council on Bioethics. It's a lively exchange, characterized by Kass's cool intellectual approach to the research (he's fine with testing on existing lines, against opening new ones) and McManus's emotional but level-headed plainspeak (he wants research to continue unrestricted).

The subtext, of course, is that there's a good chance the research could save Bridget's life. It's a tremendous passage, if for no other reason than it may be the most fair-minded and succinct summation of the debate put to page.

The emotional summit comes, however, when McManus speaks with his cardiologist, Gerald Gau, at the Mayo Clinic. The doctor asks him what stresses he has in his life, and McManus reveals that his son died in 2001: perhaps a suicide, perhaps a medical mistake. The doctor points to a painting hanging on the wall behind McManus, and says his own son Tom painted it after his other son Matthew died in a car accident 11 years before.

"The light in the room has started to fade by the time Gau has finished with me, and we hug," McManus writes. "We actually hug pretty hard."

It's not only an organic moment in the story—it's a crucial one. It lays plain all of the stress and worry that comes to the forefront in doctor visits, and the extreme trust we place in not just medicine, but its gatekeepers.

"The book, in my mind, is a hymn of praise to doctors," he says. "I think the world needs to give more praise to doctors and less to clerics."

You can bring Physical: An American Checkup (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24) into waiting rooms now.