by Andrew Schulman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016
An inspirational testament to the limitless benefits of music and its role in health care.
A near-death survivor and career musician demonstrates the true healing power of music.
In his heartfelt chronicle of unorthodox medicine, professional guitarist Schulman celebrates his sixth year as resident musician in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital. His own journey began years earlier when, at 57, he was admitted to the same ward as a terminal “Code Blue” patient with circulatory collapse following a routine pancreatic tumor excision. Along with the bedside presence of his wife, Wendy, also a professional musician, was an iPod loaded with Bach, Brahms, Debussy, Ellington, and the Beatles. It was, writes the author, “all the music that moved my heart”—just the thing to help him cope and sooth his spirit. Schulman miraculously survived his ordeal, escaping with only minor brain damage. He swiftly decided to redirect his music career toward patient care as a “medical musician” in the same ward where he was a patient just months prior. With a winning combination of anecdotal bedside stories, personal experience, and the research of neuroscientists, neuromusicologists, and fellow musicians, the author offers evidence of the calming, stabilizing, and synchronous (“entrainment”) physical effects music therapy can have on a patient’s nervous system, pain, and overall health. Though his own work in the ward was not without its share of trial and error, Schulman’s innate intuitive skills (brain surgery patients were treated to Bach first) and compassionate demeanor made him an integral part of the hospital staff. The author considers his proactive role in patient care and his own astounding recovery to have both been beautifully transformed “by the bridge that music creates between the healthy and the sick.”
An inspirational testament to the limitless benefits of music and its role in health care.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-05577-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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by Stephen Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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BOOK REVIEW
by Lulu Miller illustrated by Kate Samworth ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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