A rambling, chatty—and ultimately comforting—explanation of how interpersonal connections can improve mental and physical health. Psychiatrist Hallowell, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, draws freely on his personal and professional experiences to frame and support his case. His most basic, passionately held belief is that meaningful connections—with family, friends, pets, with art/beauty, nature, the past, and traditions, with work colleagues, institutions, God, and oneself—are what make life worth living. “The aim of this book is to convince you to make time for connectedness, even if it involves aggravation—and it usually does!” says Hallowell. He bolsters his arguments with scientific studies: the 1980s Speigel study of breast cancer survivors in support groups, for instance, and a more recent Carnegie-Mellon University study showing that use of the Internet is associated with declines in the feeling of connectedness and well-being, because there is no face-to-face human contact. Hallowell also provides illustrative case studies from his practice. Hallowell’s own father suffered from manic-depressive illness, and his mother and stepfather were alcoholics. Hallowell loosely groups his discussion into the various types of connections and offers plenty of help on how to begin to reach out to others. A real boost toward building a lifelong support system, then; this has the overall feel of a long, comfortable chat with a trusted friend.
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40357-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
A moving, heartfelt account of a hospice veteran.
Lessons about life from those preparing to die.
A longtime hospice chaplain, Egan (Fumbling: A Pilgrimage Tale of Love, Grief, and Spiritual Renewal on the Camino de Santiago, 2004) shares what she has learned through the stories of those nearing death. She notices that for every life, there are shared stories of heartbreak, pain, guilt, fear, and regret. “Every one of us will go through things that destroy our inner compass and pull meaning out from under us,” she writes. “Everyone who does not die young will go through some sort of spiritual crisis.” The author is also straightforward in noting that through her experiences with the brokenness of others, and in trying to assist in that brokenness, she has found healing for herself. Several years ago, during a C-section, Egan suffered a bad reaction to the anesthesia, leading to months of psychotic disorders and years of recovery. The experience left her with tremendous emotional pain and latent feelings of shame, regret, and anger. However, with each patient she helped, the author found herself better understanding her own past. Despite her role as a chaplain, Egan notes that she rarely discussed God or religious subjects with her patients. Mainly, when people could talk at all, they discussed their families, “because that is how we talk about God. That is how we talk about the meaning of our lives.” It is through families, Egan began to realize, that “we find meaning, and this is where our purpose becomes clear.” The author’s anecdotes are often thought-provoking combinations of sublime humor and tragic pathos. She is not afraid to point out times where she made mistakes, even downright failures, in the course of her work. However, the nature of her work means “living in the gray,” where right and wrong answers are often hard to identify.
A moving, heartfelt account of a hospice veteran.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-481-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
The ideas may be disconcerting, but they’re backed by solid research and presented with persuasive charm and wit.
Gilbert (Psychology/Harvard) examines what science has discovered about how well the human brain can predict future enjoyment.
Happiness is a subjective experience for which there is no perfectly reliable measuring instrument, the author asserts. The least flawed instrument we have is “the honest, real-time report of the attentive individual,” and to compensate for its flaws, scientists turn to the law of large numbers—i.e., measuring again and again to get lots of data. We use our imagination to look into the future, Gilbert states, but three principal shortcomings restrict its usefulness in the realm of foresight. He labels these shortcomings “realism,” “presentism” and “rationalization,” considering each in turn. Citing psychological experiments, some of which he conducted himself, the author deftly and humorously demonstrates that when we imagine future circumstances, we leave out some details that will occur and provide others that won’t. Realism ignores these adjustments and assumes that our perceptions simply reflect objective reality. Further, when we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible both to ignore how we are feeling now and to recognize how we will regard what happens later, a difficulty that Gilbert cleverly likens to trying to imagine the taste of marshmallow while chewing liver. Presentism occurs when we project the present onto the future. Rationalization is the failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen, the bad not so terrible and the good less wonderful. How then can we predict how we will feel under future circumstances? Gilbert’s answer is simple: Ask others who are in those circumstances today how they are feeling. To those who would protest that they are unique and that others’ experiences could not be relevant, he responds: No you’re not; you just like to think you are.
The ideas may be disconcerting, but they’re backed by solid research and presented with persuasive charm and wit.Pub Date: May 5, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4266-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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