A feel-good book of hope and wonder that will appeal most to readers who believe in divine intervention.
A generous collection of nonfiction medical stories from distinguished doctors.
Illinois doctor and debut author Kolbaba draws on three years’ worth of interviews with more than 200 physicians to deliver this book of extraordinary anecdotes about patients that doctors “could not explain medically.” The stories are, by turns, emotional, inspirational, and incredible, and they highlight the medical community’s patience, care, and dedication to public health. The book opens with Kolbaba’s own modest, briskly written history, covering his early days as a student who received discouraging advice from the dean of a Chicago medical school, to his thriving, 35-year career as a practicing physician. In this introduction, he notes that “holding the hand of a distressed patient…telling a bad joke to lighten up the often somber mood…or saying a prayer with a spiritual family are the intangibles in medicine that help heal the human spirit.” He also shares a few resonant patient-care stories from his own practice. The first set of other physicians’ tales tell of apparent godly interventions when modern medicine wasn’t enough. These are followed by haunting stories of people who say that they had helpful visions of deceased relatives, near-death experiences, and moments of eerie coincidence. Elsewhere are recollections of seemingly miraculous recoveries and healings. One may read this book in a single sitting, or one may savior the individual stories one by one for quick dashes of inspiration. Many of the tales tap into the need for human empathy that nearly everyone feels when injured or ill. That said, the collection as a whole is often spiritually heavy-handed, which may alienate irreligious readers, and many entries are just a few scant pages long, which will leave some people wanting more details. Still, this uplifting volume does successfully capture “the true essence of the doctor’s experience,” as it promises.
A feel-good book of hope and wonder that will appeal most to readers who believe in divine intervention.Pub Date: July 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5308-4157-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Mack has taken on the prophetic tone of Whitley Strieber in his latest works about alien contact, a tone that can become annoying. Mack created quite a stir when he published his book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens a few years back. Why, people wanted to know, was this brilliant Harvard psychiatrist supporting the delusions of people who are clearly crazy? But Mack insists they—re not crazy, that, in fact, on all personality and other psychological tests given to them, abductees seem completely normal. After working with hundreds more abductees over the past few years, Mack has concluded that they and aliens together have important lessons for us. For, according to Mack, the aliens come not from another planet, but from an other reality—a kind of parallel universe. They “are forcing us to appreciate that cosmic realities exist beyond the three-dimensional universe that has bounded our earthly existence.” “The cosmos that is revealed by this opening of consciousness . . . appears to be filled with beings, creatures, spirits, intelliigences, gods . . . that have through the millennia been intimately involved with human existence.” In support of this thesis, Mack focuses in depth on several aspects of the abductees” experience: the sense abductees have that their bodies begin to “vibrate” at a “higher frequency” when in contact with the bright light and energy of the aliens; the environmental lessons that the aliens seem to be teaching the abductees, and the intense bonds of love that develop between the abductees and the aliens. The abductees quoted by Mack here believe the aliens are in some sense messengers of God, or Source, as they call this power. Mack quotes at length from a selection of abductees, all of whose testimony echo these themes. Only the most dedicated abduction devotees will be able to read this all the way through without intense skepticism.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1999
ISBN: 0-517-70568-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
A comprehensive investigation of encounters with unidentified flying objects, all the more riveting because it is both skeptical and scrupulously objective. What facts do we have regarding UFOs? asks an international team of scientists headed by Sturrock (Physics/Stanford Univ.). What is the physical evidence, and what is it trying to tell us? Taking pains to avoid sounding frivolous, the team reviews the records of UFO encounters. Many can be explained as misinterpretations of such man-made objects as satellites, or as natural phenomena like marsh gas, manifestations of lightning, or wave ducting, which causes radar mirages. Other experiences are characterized here as “suggestive but far from sufficient” in terms of data. Even more intriguing are the “anomalies,” a full 30% of the notable contacts, often sighted by multiple observers without discernible ulterior motives, some with photographic evidence, some with material remains, some tracked on radar screens, all left unexplained after a battery of tests that include such jawbreakers as micro-densitometry scans of photographic film crystals, and the probings of spark mass spectrometry. The scope and detail of these analyses make them tough going for the lay reader, but the narrative sections and interviews are captivating. It’s particularly gratifying to read the investigators— exquisite debunkings of the bureaucratic obfuscation and mumbo jumbo with which government officials have smugly dismissed UFO sightings. This cavalier attitude won—t do, the study argues; we need more systematic data collection and procedures. Given the randomness of UFO events, however, that may be asking for the impossible. The ultimate conclusion here is a rousing Who knows? Nonetheless, —a signal emerges from the noise and that signal is not readily comprehensible in terms of phenomena now well known to science.” In other words, something is out there; it’s just unidentified. (Photos, charts, diagrams)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-446-52565-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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