A lucid, engrossing memoir from a psychologist and philosopher dedicated to the afterlife.
If Moody’s (The Last Laugh, 1999, etc.) career capstone arrived with the lionizing 1975 publication of his landmark report Life after Life, his memoir, co-authored by Perry (co-author: Evidence of the Afterlife, 2010, etc.), an acclaimed author on the subject, affords his life’s work even more dramatic heft. Moody’s passion for the spiritual world can be traced to an early childhood in World War II–era Georgia raised by an abusively crass father and a depressed mother. He recalls at age 4 establishing theories about death and concepts of postmortem “soul survival.” Moody writes ardently of an interest in astronomy throughout adolescence, undeterred by a skeptical father and crippling myxedema, a thyroid deficiency. As a philosophy scholar, he became “hooked on death” and intensely explored spiritual phenomena, out-of-body sensations, near-death events and theories of mind-body coexistence. Plumbing an interest in “facilitated visions” via hypnotic past-life regression therapy, Moody details his nine former lives, including that of a threadbare wooly mammoth hunter, a drowning boat builder and a murdered female Chinese artist. He coined the term “near-death experience” as his first book soared in popularity; on the lecture circuit, he befriended fellow afterlife pioneer Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Then his illness resurfaced, causing a suicide attempt and a stint at a psychiatric facility after his experimentations with spirit communication and crystallomancy were discovered by his closed-minded father. Now in his mid-60s, Moody continues his revolutionary research. The supernatural undertones saturating the narrative are dwarfed by an overwhelming sense that this eccentric visionary just might be on to something. The fascinating life story of an impassioned mystical maverick.
Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-204642-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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