Eye-opening and entertainingly voyeuristic, this impressionistic taste test illustrates the struggles more than the benefits...
An Australian travel writer’s exuberant sampling of wellness methods.
After years of drinking, smoking, and carefree eating, Guardian senior writer Delaney (This Restless Life: Churning Through Love, Work, and Travel, 2009, etc.) sought to “reset my body and my life.” Enticed by a magazine assignment, the author left Brooklyn for her native Australia to embark on a controversial, promise-laden 101-day fasting program and evaluate its effectiveness. Though the program’s core clinician diagnosed her as “highly toxic,” the author began the hardcore regimen with a mixture of enthusiasm, hopefulness, and skepticism. Though she didn’t finish successfully, the process itself was by turns fascinating, grueling, and tedious. Her body revolted, her mind raced, and her breath became repulsive; she also suffered two bouts of frightening chest pain. Delaney expanded her wellness survey to include the extreme, sweat-dripping physical demands of Bikram yoga. She also opines on the addictive nature of the multibillion-dollar wellness industry and how it has replaced religion for some, and she evaluates its place in society as a commodity. She effectively explores the nuances of the “so-called healing crisis paradox” and, through her own anecdotes and experiences, probes how and why people feel the need to detoxify their bodies (and minds) and emerge “clean” from impurities. In the final section, Delaney delves into the art of coffee colonics, meditation, and the mindful serenity craze, chronicling her time at a silent retreat. While the author reached no profound epiphany, she admits that “the road to wellness has been my own personal stations of the cross,” achieved with mixed results. Throughout the narrative, Delaney proves to be a witty tour guide across the wellness wonderland, and the book will certainly appeal to readers curious to dip their feet in.
Eye-opening and entertainingly voyeuristic, this impressionistic taste test illustrates the struggles more than the benefits of detoxification techniques.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77164-370-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Greystone Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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