A fascinating and candid analysis of the process of dying.
Insights into what people experience as they die.
"The paranormal or spiritual experience comes unbidden," writes Pearson (A Brief History of Anxiety…Yours and Mine, 2009, etc.), and yet many people are skeptical when they hear someone talking about a psychic event, a clairvoyant moment or a near-death experience. Mystified by her own encounters with the paranormal initiated by the deaths of her sister and father, Pearson set out to unravel some of the marvels surrounding death. With straightforward prose, the author examines these phenomena, particularly those moments when loved ones were close to dying and suddenly seemed at peace and happy as they acknowledged their progression from this state of being to another. Using interviews with hospice nurses, medical professionals and ordinary people from all walks of life, Pearson carefully lays out the details of each encounter. The sense of peace and unconditional love is a universal theme, as well as the healing and comforting white light associated with visions of God or other deities. Some people discuss how they knew through dreams that a loved one had just died or was on the verge of death. Others talk of seeing their bodies on operating tables or in perilous situations and yet feeling calm and in control. The author explores the unknown with genuine sincerity, providing a perspective that is informative and yet a bit awed at the prospect that there is something beyond what we experience in this realm. "Whatever the phenomenon is,” she writes, “it is extraordinary and transformative, and propels human beings far beyond what endorphin rushes or tricks of the optic nerve could ever achieve." Readers will be humbled and filled with a sense of hope rather than fear as they realize that the deaths of loved ones, or even their own deaths, are not losses, but simply transitions.
A fascinating and candid analysis of the process of dying.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5706-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This account of how US authorities studied the surviving victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ought to be of wide interest, but Lindee's version of the story will not attract a general readership outside academic circles. Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, has described the atomic bomb survivors as ``people who, despite all, didn't commit suicide.'' After the war these people comprised the world's best sample by far for studies of how exposure to radiation affects individuals and their offspring. An Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission was set up under the US Atomic Energy Commission, and the work of the ABCC over nearly three decades is the subject of this book. Lindee (History and Sociology of Science/Univ. of Pennsylvania) refers to the ABCC's work as ``colonial science,'' by which she means primarily that the dominant power could not carry out its work without the cooperation of its defeated subjects. How was the organization and work of the commission affected by this dilemma? Did any kind of systematic bias creep into the many scientific papers published under its auspices? These are the kinds of questions that interest Lindee, but the language in which she cloaks her conclusions sometimes makes it hard to tell what they are. Take the question of why it was decided that the ABCC would not provide medical care to the survivors as it was studying them: ``I suggest that the treatment debate was a forum in which various parties explored the proper relationship of the Americans to the Japanese.'' Although this is an authoritative scholarly work, it suffers from an excess of sophistication and circumspection, so that the questions readers most want answered are not addressed squarely enough.
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-226-48237-5
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Most of the adjectives and metaphors that initially come to mind to describe tigers seem to have originally come from them. Poetry in motion. Predatory cunning. We don't use other animal or human traits to describe tigers; we use tigers to describe the world. Or to sell cereal, hawk gasoline, or bestow on sports teams the combination of controlled ferocity and grace that William Blake called ``fearful symmetry.'' Poetry can't elevate a tiger. Being the thing itself, a tiger is already elevated. But pictures like the ones in this book are good. And facts are good, too. They ground wonderment in knowledge. How'd you like to be able to carry 50 pounds of meat in your stomach? This is just one of the facts in this companion text to a PBS installment of the In the Wild series. Barnes, who writes on wildlife for The Guardian in England, covers the lives and shrinking habitats of Siberian, Indian, Sumatran, and Indochinese tigers. He also writes about poaching and efforts to stop it. (75 color photos, 75 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11544-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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