Sensitive but skeptical, a narrative for practitioners and patients alike about the search to understand a corner of the...
A seasoned doctor takes on the head-scratching phenomenon of near-death experiences.
Part gallery of cases, part theory of medicine, debut memoirist Bellg’s look at near-death experiences bridges issues of body and mind. After forgoing a research career, Bellg pursued work as a critical care doctor in an ICU. The often high-stakes scenarios of the ICU brought her into contact with patients close to drawing their last breaths—or who had “died.” Both recollection and commentary, Bellg’s book tracks her patients’ puzzling out-of-body episodes and her attempts to grapple with them. In one startling anecdote, a patient recovering from cardiac arrest described to Bellg not only the details of his surgery, for which he was supposedly unconscious, but the specifics of a nurse training center on the floor above. Another patient recounted how an injection given as part of an imaging procedure sent him on a race through the cosmos. By happenstance, on Bellg’s first day of medical school—when she received a copy of an anthology that dealt with the “more philosophical, relationship-centered” side of medicine—she encountered something of the approach touted in her own book, one that convincingly advocates stronger roles for empathy, patient testimony, and emotional intelligence in institutionalized medical practice. Framing the history of medicine as a prolonged refutation of superstition, she recognizes the obstacles inherent in persuading others to see NDEs as genuine, not just apparent, medical phenomena. Bellg’s responses to these obstacles, though hardly conclusive, are well-considered. She indicates, for instance, the difficulties that would plague any attempt to seriously study NDEs empirically and suggests that observations of NDEs are “simply the beginning of developing a scientific understanding of them.” And she emphasizes the qualitative differences, for her patients, between NDEs and average dreams. Above all, she argues persuasively that patients should be accorded dignity when their stories about these bizarre but often transformative experiences are acknowledged rather than dismissed.
Sensitive but skeptical, a narrative for practitioners and patients alike about the search to understand a corner of the unknown in medicine.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9965103-0-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Sloan Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Problematic structure aside, a comprehensive history of Latin America's largest country.
A thoroughly documented scholarly treatise on Brazilian history.
In the first of two volumes spanning 500 years of Brazilian history, Hufferd focuses on the first 300 years of colonization in the northeast region. Portugal was seeking to build maritime trade to compete successfully with archrival Spain and to retain its national identity. The colony expanded westward from a number of large tracts of lands called captaincies, granted by Portuguese monarchs to wealthy royal favorites in return for profits gained through trade, breeding cattle and other ventures. These captaincies eventually gained the status of states, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Mato Grasso, Manaus and Amazonia. Over subsequent decades, enterprising adventurers and explorers from these captaincies ventured inland, establishing sugar mills, cultivating grazing land and extracting gold, silver and precious gems. All ventures were highly labor-intensive, requiring massive amounts of manpower driven by slaves from Africa and native tribes. In the second volume, Hufferd focuses on the final 200 years of Brazil's rapid industrialization. After the Portuguese monarchy was forced to relocate its base from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, it became the fulcrum of a delicate political system within the new country. The social and political structure favored privileged hereditary landowners, even after the last reigning Emperor Pedro II was deposed amidst strong republican sentiment. Continuing the narrative through 2000, Hufferd chronicles upheavals most often caused by the chronic underdevelopment of existing resources, as the landowners maintained authority over the land, to the detriment of the black, mulatto and tribal segments of Brazilian society, who remained disenfranchised until recent years. In each volume, the author illustrates his vast knowledge of the topic, and he weaves political, economic, social and biographical threads throughout the panoramic narrative. While the expansive footnotes demonstrate impeccable research, they eventually hinder the narrative flow, requiring endless paging back and forth–the dissertation-style format ultimately detracts from the book's impact.
Problematic structure aside, a comprehensive history of Latin America's largest country.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2006
ISBN: 1-4208-0278-X, Vol.
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
At 91, Spock (Dr. Spock on Parenting, 1988, etc.) offers his twilight thoughts on American society—and they're not happy ones. Although Spock's jabs come from the political left, his diagnosis is not unlike that of social conservatives like William Bennett. Among his points: The unraveling of family cohesiveness is a major cause of the country's social ills; there is a ``progressive coarsening of the society's attitude toward love and sexuality, which is further cheapened and exploited by television, films and popular music.'' But Spock also argues for better day-care facilities so that single motherhood needn't sentence both parent and child to poverty. He also discusses racial and gender discrimination. At heart, the old doctor is battling against a bottom-line, instrumental valuation of human life, an obsession with material riches rather than an appreciation of emotional richness.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1994
ISBN: 1-882605-12-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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