by Allene Symons ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 8, 2015
An overly speculative but sympathetic look at Huxley’s cadre of determined investigators probing the mind.
Symons (Communications and Media Studies/Santa Ana Coll.; Nostradamus, Vagabond Prophet, 2011, etc.) explores Aldous Huxley’s quest to expand consciousness.
In the 1940s and ’50s, the author’s father, Howard Thrasher, an aircraft engineer, pursued what he called the Hand Project: photographing human hands and examining them for insights into personality traits and even mental illness. Like phrenologists feeling bumps on the skull, he believed the hand was “a mirror of the mind.” Symons was surprised to discover a photograph of Huxley’s hands among her father’s collection and even more surprised to learn that Huxley had invited Thrasher to his dinners and gatherings, which sometimes featured séances and/or hypnosis. Always interested in “fringe-of-science ideas,” Huxley, his nephew once remarked, “liked the company of large minds with obsessions.” Huxley’s obsessions included consciousness-altering experiences through the use of psychedelic drugs. With his colleague, physician Humphry Osmond, he conceived Outsight, a project whose goal was “to advance human consciousness and…draw attention to a chemically induced way of accessing some higher dimension.” To gain credibility with potential funders—the Ford and Rockefeller foundations rebuffed him—he envisioned gathering a group of “gifted people” willing to take the drug and form “a kind of mescalinized think-tank.” Meanwhile, he wrote about his experiences in The Doors of Perception (1954), from which Symons draws, along with correspondence and interviews. Although his visionary quest has been well-known through his writings, Symons creates candid portraits of Huxley and his circle—his wife, Maria, who ministered to his every need, though dying of cancer; Gerald Heard, founder of a 300-acre spiritual retreat in rural California; and the hardworking Osmond. Unfortunately, the author’s account is weakened by imagined conversations about what “probably” happened.
An overly speculative but sympathetic look at Huxley’s cadre of determined investigators probing the mind.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63388-116-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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