There’s much here to interest both adherents to and skeptics of today’s alternative and holistic medicines, as well as fans...
A well-researched biography that seeks to restore the reputation of the doctor satirized in T.C. Boyle’s novel The Road to Wellville (1993) and in the film of the same name.
Wilson (Comparative Religion/Western Michigan Univ.; Yankees in Michigan, 2008, etc.) has done much more than provide a sympathetic biography of the man who headed the once-famous Battle Creek Sanitarium, the name John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943) gave to the Seventh-Day Adventist’s Western Health Reform Institute when he became its director in 1876. While the author fully explores the doctor’s role there, more important is his examination of the conflicts among various schools of religious, philosophical and scientific thought in the United States at the time. Kellogg struggled to reconcile the science he had learned as a doctor with the teachings of his church; ultimately, his deviation from church doctrines led to his expulsion. Believing that the purity of the body was as important for salvation as the purity of the soul, he developed the concept of biologic living, the rules for which he spelled out in detail in various books and promoted at the sanitarium. The first rule: “Obedience to the laws of life and health is a moral obligation.” Among his many precepts was the forgoing of meat. He taught that since the abandonment of vegetarianism in Eden, the human race has been sliding into decline, manifested by the short life span of modern men. In time, Kellogg became increasingly concerned over what he saw as the threat of race degeneration, devoting the last 30 years of his life to eugenics, the so-called science of improving the human race by controlling heredity. Wilson demonstrates convincingly where Kellogg’s ideas about health reform originated and how they evolved.
There’s much here to interest both adherents to and skeptics of today’s alternative and holistic medicines, as well as fans of American history, especially the history of religions.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-253-01447-4
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Brief inspirational essays from 30 popular gurus, presented by West Coast therapists Carlson and Shield. This anthology, the editors tell us, is an attempt to understand and connect us with the ``world of Soul.'' The essays are grouped into seven sections, with names like ``Rekindling Your Soul'' and ``A Return to Soul''; but since the material for the most part lacks differentiation, these divisions have little meaning. Rabbi Harold Kushner points out that, rather than remove a problem, God more often offers us inner strength to face it; Elisabeth KÅbler-Ross speaks of how crises have the power to open life up for us; while Stephen Covey reminds us of how nourishment of the soul has plenty to do with obedience to our conscience and our role in the community. Although there is much here about the importance of meditation and awareness in daily life, most of the contributors do not refer to the struggle that this involves and content themselves with exhortations and truisms about life's hidden possibilities. Furthermore, with rare exceptions, including Ram Dass, they do not tell us what they actually mean by ``the soul'' and how they understand its nature, even though many, like Wayne Dyer, presuppose the doctrine that the soul is in some sense God, or that one soul is common to all of us. The reader is left with a bland spirituality that, while it may provide a little depth for busy Americans, lacks so much as a hint of the awe and searing passion of a Milarepa or a John of the Cross. Popularized, feel-good wisdom, presented as a bromide instead of an incentive to more serious seeking.
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-12812-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
Guaranteed to alter your thinking about communication. Peters (Communication Studies/Univ. of Iowa) begins this delightful essay by observing that “Only moderns could be facing each other and be worried about ‘communicating’ as if they were thousands of miles apart.” For Peters, the concept of communication has evolved in tandem with its technology, leaving us chasing a moving target rather than closing in on a fixed ideal. It appears unavoidable that human beings divide the world into “me” and “not me” in distinct ways, creating both the joy of a world populated by individual personalities and the frustration of an insuperable barrier to transfers of unmodified meaning from one person to another. Intensifying the quest for “genuine” communication, whether introspectively through therapy or socially through increasingly powerful forms of media, expands our expectations along with our capabilities and can produce a crisis of communication in the midst of an information age. Peters is excellent at finding novel ways to illustrate this continuing “project of reconciling self and other.” The range of options is presented through contrasting the interactive and selective approach of Socrates (dialogue) with the one-way and all-inclusive approach of Jesus (dissemination). The essential association of communication with existence emerges in consideration of spirits and spiritualism in everything from philosophy to sÇances. The scope of communicative ambition is underlined by consideration of attempts to interact with animals and aliens. In the end, Peters concludes that the fears of isolation, which have pushed us to pursue communication as the true meeting of minds, have too often overshadowed our appreciation of what is unique. Touch, the ability to come into direct contact with another being, and time, the expression of our mortality, are “the two nonreproducible things we can share, our only guarantees of sincerity” through which we can “face the holiness and wretchedness of our finitude.” Original, erudite, and beautifully written, this book is a gem.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-226-66276-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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