A refreshingly unconventional blend of science and spirituality.
A psychotherapist articulates a more holistic approach to healing trauma and restoring well-being.
Church (Gestures of the Heart, 2004) argues that only a “unified self” truly experiences well-being and that “whole-person intelligence” is actually based in “a systemic model of heart-mind-body.” Trauma and anxiety are not merely plagues of the mind, but disorders that reside deeply in the body, and so an effective therapeutic response requires more than merely talk therapy—a brain addled with emotional turmoil needs to be physically rewired. The author furnishes a detailed account of what such a comprehensive response looks like, which recruits the aid of “Harmonize Now Tools,” strategies of visualization and somatic gestures designed to restore the brain’s harmony. She explains—with the helpful use of Porter’s (Bobbie the Wonder Dog, 2016, etc.) illustrations—the way in which various self-administered touches and movements as well as intentional visualizations can stimulate the parts of the nervous system and brain hobbled by trauma: “I am interested in the linkage between the brain stem, the limbic system, and cortical knowing. Or, in other words, listening to the body, feeling feelings, and being insightful, and the joy of bringing all three together.” Church’s approach is spiritually infused—there is no shortage of references to “The Divine” and the “Higher Self”—but also pragmatically empirical, insisting on discernible results as a guide to what works and what doesn’t. The book isn’t designed to be a replacement for therapy—in fact, it’s principally addressed to other therapists, though the writing is so lucid it should be accessible to a wide audience. Even Church’s lengthy and detailed discussions of neuroscience and physiology—both captivating and rigorous—are conducted in marvelously clear terms. But occasionally, the author waxes philosophic in a way that goes well beyond the scientifically demonstrable and is confusedly vague: for example, her understanding of the “luminosity” of the divine is more poetic than articulate.
A refreshingly unconventional blend of science and spirituality.Pub Date: July 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62901-542-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Inkwater Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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