An uplifting and reassuring work testifying to the deep restorative and spiritual—though not necessarily religious—nature of...
A hospice doctor with an “aversion to the supernatural” examines the experiences of patients’ end-of-life dreams and visions and proposes that they have profound meaning and impact.
Intrigued by his patients’ nearly ubiquitous reports of healing, restorative, and closure-providing visions in the days and hours before death, Kerr, the chief medical officer for the Center for Hospice & Palliative Care in Buffalo, embarked on a long-term study of these experiences, and he recounts many of them in this sympathetic and intriguing book. Readers looking for evidence of an afterlife, an eternal soul, or insight into what happens to us after death will not find it here. Instead, as the author takes pains to illustrate, it is what transpires just before death that proves to be profound and meaningful for patients and their loved ones. “These experiences simply give each patient what they need the most,” Kerr writes about the dreams that are more vivid and real than any that have come before and usually boil down to feelings of genuine love: the love of a deceased dog acting as a guide into death for a dying child; the sight of a mother’s arms reaching out from above an elderly woman’s bed; dreams that allow a widow to relive quiet, happy moments doing crosswords with her deceased spouse. Even distressing dreams serve to work out and heal old wounds and bring peace in the final hours. While Kerr’s exclusive focus on patients’ words and experiences—rather than those of caregivers or researchers with their occasionally detached perspectives and potential agendas—is admirable, the presentation of one case study after another, with each patient’s introduction, backstory, and experiences, becomes a little tedious, and some amount of contextualizing data or further description of research findings would have been welcome. (Readers can find some of this information in the author’s TEDx talk along with video footage of selected patients; watching makes a nice companion to the book.)
An uplifting and reassuring work testifying to the deep restorative and spiritual—though not necessarily religious—nature of pre-death visions.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-54284-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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