Well (The Marriage of the Sun and Moon, Chocolate to Morphine) at his unusual and controversial best: a rigorous exploration of the broad questions raised by "alternative therapies" that opens up the whole issue of a mind-body connection and its importance in healing. The Harvard-trained physician and adept of traditional cures draws on his own experiences (as patient and physician), on medical and scientific literature, and on reports from colleagues and acquaintances to develop a new model of health and healing. In Well's view, orthodox, allopathic medicine has much to offer (it's the treatment he'd choose for severe trauma or heart attack, for instance); but it has become bound by its practitioners' efforts to make it a "real" science, like physics or chemistry. In actuality: "health and illness are. . . close to the mysteries at the heart of existence." On the other hand, traditional therapies like homeopathy, faith healing, and acupuncture (to which Well would turn first for some cancers, arthritis, and many chronic diseases), if unable to fully explain the mind-body connection, do exploit it to the fullest in healing. Well would define health as a temporary "dynamic and harmonious equilibrium of all the elements and forces making up and surrounding a human being." Perfect health, analogously, is unattainable. It is all right to be sick (anger and guilt interfere with healing); the body has innate healing abilities that can be cultivated; agents of disease—like genes—are not causes of disease (thus, possibilities for prevention increase); all illness involves both mind and body components; each body is different, and has its own weak point. Proceeding from such new ideas, Weil examines the history and practice of allopathic medicine, osteopathy, chiropractic, naturopathy, Chinese medicine, Shamanism, mind cures, faith healing, psychic healing, holistic medicine, and quackery: what works and what doesn't in each system? what do they have in common? what does it all mean for the future? New kinds of research are needed, Well concludes, into such "anomalous occurrences," with mind-body implications, as wart cures (why does the raw potato/new moon treatment work?), placebo responses, and spiritualists-walking-barefoot-on-hot-coals. It also behooves us to change our concept of proven: let it mean "tested"—by time, experiment, or experience—and the way will be open to the use of alternative therapies. Meanwhile, we should learn how to keep healthy most of the time and "to recognize and correct most deviations from health" without consulting orthodox or unorthodox practitioners. A sound theoretical exploration, personably set forth.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1983
ISBN: 0395377641
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1983
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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