Alexander uses his medical credentials to substantiate the belief that his reconstructed memories offer conclusive proof of...
A remarkable account of miraculous recovery from bacterial meningitis and a transformative “Near-Death Experience.”
On Nov. 10, 2008, at the age of 54, neurosurgeon Alexander awakened with an excruciating head- and backache and then suffered a grand mal epileptic seizure. Rushed to the hospital, tests showed that his brain was infected with E. coli bacteria that proved to be highly resistant to antibiotics and were destroying his neocortex. He remained in a deep coma for a week, as the expectation of his survival dimmed. Alexander recounts significant events in his life and explains his medical condition and the treatment he received, although at the time, he was not consciously aware of the situation. Interspersed are chapters in which he relates what he believes to be details of a “[b]rilliant, vibrant, ecstatic, stunning” psychic event he experienced during the coma. He describes an extraordinary radiant white-gold light and the most beautiful music he had ever heard, as well as travel to the gates of heaven, accompanied by an angelic figure who led him to the “strangest, most beautiful world” he had ever seen. Although Alexander had previously been a religious skeptic, this intense experience convinced him of the existence of heaven and a loving, personal God; the primacy of consciousness over matter; and the reality of psychic experiences such as telepathic communication. After seven days, he awoke with his faculties intact, although he needed time to fully recover his memory.
Alexander uses his medical credentials to substantiate the belief that his reconstructed memories offer conclusive proof of his current religious beliefs; readers who don't share these beliefs will find his account less convincing.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9518-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
The name of C.S. Lewis will no doubt attract many readers to this volume, for he has won a splendid reputation by his brilliant writing. These sermons, however, are so abstruse, so involved and so dull that few of those who pick up the volume will finish it. There is none of the satire of the Screw Tape Letters, none of the practicality of some of his later radio addresses, none of the directness of some of his earlier theological books.
Pub Date: June 15, 1949
ISBN: 0060653205
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1949
This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. . . . In the meantime, in between time, we can see. . . we can work at making sense of (what) we see. . . to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. It's common sense; when you-move in, you try to learn the neighborhood." Dillard's "neighborhood" is hilly Virginia country where she lived alone, but essentially it is all those "shreds of creation" with which every human is surrounded, which she is trying to learn, to know — from finite variations to infinite possibilities of being and meaning. A tall order and Dillard doesn't quite fill it. She is too impatient to get about the soul's adventures to stay long with an egg-laying grasshopper, or other bits of flora and fauna, and her snatches from physics and biological/metaphysical studies are this side of frivolous. However, Ms. Dillard has a great deal going for her — in spite of some repetition of words and concepts, her prose is bright, fresh and occasionally emulates (not imitates) the Walden Master in a contemporary context: "Trees. . . extend impressively in both directions, . . . shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach." She has set herself no less a task than understanding emotionally, spiritually and intellectually the force of the creative extravagance of the universe in all its beauty and horhor ("There is a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life to a universal chomp.") Experience can be focused, and awareness sharpened, by a kind of meditative high. Thus this becomes somewhat exhausting reading, if taken in toto, but even if Dillard's reach exceeds her grasp, her sights are leagues higher than that of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, regretfully (re her sex), the inevitable comparison.
Pub Date: March 13, 1974
ISBN: 0061233323
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1974
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