A wide-ranging, if sometimes-overwritten, study of how people process discomfort.
A chiropractor’s philosophical treatise about the nature and treatment of pain
In this nonfiction book, Cooper (I, Cancer, 2009) discusses different types of pain, from the chronic, physical variety to emotional, psychological, or even romantic discomfort. It also addresses specific pains—such as those experienced by women dealing with sexism and misogyny, or by parents raising fractious children. Along the way, it brings in concepts from various faiths. The author sees chronic physical pain, in particular, as an urgent crisis: “More Americans currently die from doctor-prescribed narcotic pain meds than from illicit heroin and cocaine overdoses combined,” he asserts. In response to this epidemic, Cooper reminds readers that both pain and healing are intrinsic parts of being human: “We are irrefutably among the most marvelous creations of the universe, veritable healing machines.” The core of his treatise asserts that people make their pain worse by mixing emotional grievances into it—a deeply ingrained instinct that he characterizes as “adding insult to injury.” To remedy this, the author concentrates on what he calls the “fire in the belly”—the act of removing cognitive elements from the experience of pain in order to trigger the production of serotonin and dopamine. This method, he says, will “allow you to pass through moments of suffering as innately as does a whale, a lion, or an eagle.” Some sentiments in this book are written in an overblown style (such as “And then there is that molten gut domain, your id, where unfettered atmospheres sporadically manage to flood the banks of your socially correct superego”). Other ideas seem speculative, at best; he provides no scientific support, for instance, for the notion that animals pass through moments of suffering any easier than humans do. That said, the book’s focus on the stress of a “vicious cycle” of negative self-evaluation is valuable, no matter what specific pain one may be enduring. Cooper’s broad-brush approach—which includes not only Christian concepts of suffering and atonement, but also the key Buddhist idea of dukkha—will also give readers a great deal to think about.
A wide-ranging, if sometimes-overwritten, study of how people process discomfort.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5043-9722-3
Page Count: 166
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sometimes murky, frequently meandering excursion into the meaning of ancient Andean beliefs, arguing that in a series of sophisticated myths Incan soothsayers foretold their own civilization's doom at the hands of Pizarro and his conquistadors in 1532. Sullivan, a scholar of Native American cultures, begins with a question that has perplexed historians of the Spanish conquest: How could the vast Inca Empire, with its millions of subjects, have been conquered overnight by a band of 170 Spanish adventurers? Sullivan digs into the history and mythology of Andean civilization to find what he feels is the answer: For hundreds of years the sages of the Andes had believed that astronomical transitions presaged earthly cataclysms; reading changes in the night skies in the 1400s, Incan priest-astronomers foretold the imminent destruction of their own recently founded empire. Sullivan argues, in a sometimes hyperbolic first-person account (``In that moment I had, I believed, touched for an instant the terrible burden and tragic urgency of the Inca vision''), that the Incas followed the planets, recorded precessional events in their myths, and equated social and celestial changes. He further asserts that elements in Incan culture preceding Pizarro's arrival—constant warfare and the Incan ritual of human sacrifice—represented an attempt to halt the march of time and prevent the apocalyptic events foreshadowed by changes in the night sky. The Incas assumed that the arrival of Pizarro represented the culmination of the prophecy and the failure of their own efforts to prevent its occurrence. The thread of the author's argument can be hard to follow. Still, Sullivan's deep feeling for Andean folk materials, and the originality of his observations about Andean astronomy, make his text worthwhile for those interested in the history of South American civilization and for those who, in the wake of Joseph Campbell's works, seek enduring meaning in ancient mythology. (History Book Club and One Spirit Book Club alternate selections)
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-517-59468-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
Jacobs knows that people think he's crazy. He is a bona fide historian at Temple University—and a leading UFO researcher. He has interviewed, mostly under hypnosis, hundreds of people who say they have been abducted by aliens, and he thinks he's figured out why they are here—and it's not Whitley Strieber's mystical, New Age vision of cosmic harmony. Rather, it is interspecies breeding, because the aliens cannot reproduce themselves. ``The aliens are conducting a widespread, systematic program of physiological exploitation of human beings,'' he states. Jacobs gives vivid, detailed descriptions of the alien/human hybrids and mating and fetal implantation procedues, based on the accounts given by his interviewees. You can classify this with Star Trek or engage in a willing suspension of disbelief, which might be allowed Jacobs on the assumption that he, a solid academic, and the many, many people he interviewed—with similar accounts uninformed by prior knowledge of other abductions—can't all be crazy.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-81484-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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