An investigation into popular relaxation methods, packaged as chick lit.
A longtime panic-attack sufferer and the co-author of The Faith Club, Warner decided that she wanted to acquire the relaxed brain of a Tibetan monk. This decision set her on a journey to exploring myriad techniques to help her chill out beyond the temporary fix of Klonopin. Among the alternatives: psychotherapy; a Buddhist meditation course; guided imagery with Belleruth Naparstek; walking meditation; a Jewish mikvah bath; Trager therapy; Somatic Experience therapy; EMDR; and a Windhorse meditation retreat with Pema Chodron. With these new techniques in hand, Warner dealt with real-life issues like visiting her ailing mother in an Alzheimer’s unit and the death of her beloved dog. She explains each healing process with enthusiasm and includes conversations with master teachers/doctors with whom she seems immediately familiar. Warner’s personal stories add emotion and help readers comprehend the effects of the more abstract methods of relaxation. The author also took up thangka painting with a Lama from Tibet, spending countless hours drawing the perfectly symmetrical face of the Buddha as she absorbed lessons of peace and compassion. After she continued to complain about her ailing mother’s pain, Lama Tsondru brought her down to earth with the sage advice, ”Look at all the other mothers in the world who are suffering; make yourself a Bodhisattva, with compassion for others.” Ditch the drugs and learn to relax naturally.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8107-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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