A well-defended, somewhat scientific argument about the power of positive thinking.
A physician unfolds his theory about curing cancer—not by fighting it with hatred but by correcting it with love.
The “war on cancer” is a familiar phrase to many. But what if the solution involves loving your cancer instead of battling it? This is the heart of Rushenas’ (Le Sang-Graal, 2011) work. Readers are the gods of their cells, and the emotions they radiate “will lead to specific changes at the cellular level, for better or for worse.” Using intense personification, the author explains that projecting hatred to cancer cells (or “orphan cells,” as he compassionately calls them) will cause them to violently retaliate whereas sending them unconditional love can restore harmony. So does this mean people can just think their way out of having cancer? Though the whole book seems to head toward this, in the end Rushenas asserts that traditional cancer treatments (chemotherapy, radiotherapy, etc.) are still the answer. But they should be viewed as lovingly correcting the cancer cells, not resentfully destroying them. Just as near-death experiences often give people feelings of sublime love and joy and a desire to change, this cellular near-death experience can have a momentous, positive effect on cancer cells. The author notes, however, that emotional visualization (imagining being healthy) must be coupled with corresponding actions (maintaining a beneficial lifestyle) to be effectual. Rushenas efficiently builds his theory one principle at a time, establishing each idea so that it’s fully understandable, and even quite believable, before moving forward. Unfortunately, the price he pays for clarity and persuasion is verbosity: The topic of cancer doesn’t take center stage until Page 91, and readers must plod through extensive autobiographical details and thick metaphysical musings to get there. As a doctor, Rushenas elevates the discussion of human energy to a new level with his scientific observations, especially concerning cell biology. Readers who are open to pseudoscience (like the Emoto water experiments the author refers to) will be most receptive to Rushenas’ theory, though others will likely still be intrigued by this novel perspective.
A well-defended, somewhat scientific argument about the power of positive thinking.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4834-8734-2
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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