A manual that should be highly therapeutic for the fearful and anxious.
A guide provides practical tactics for facing up to fear.
Australian physician Sedhoff has written a self-help book that goes far beyond the terror associated with Covid-19. This eminently readable text addresses fear in the larger sense, offering an authoritative overview of the subject as well as a programmatic way to “resolve” one’s apprehensions. Part 1 begins with an illuminating introduction to the ways in which fear affects the brain specifically and individuals in general. The author then dives into a seven-stage process designed to reduce the “fear burden.” Each of these stages contains numerous, clearly identified actions to take, such as four mindfulness skills, four “methods to create structure and routine,” and three steps to overcome social anxieties. One of the more intriguing chapters in the first part of the book concerns how the media can heighten various forms of fear. Part 2 takes a more novel approach: Here, Sedhoff suggests strategies for turning the “fear monster to friend.” The author characterizes the fear monster as “ ‘a balloon monster’…that looks real on the outside, but get inside it and we find it is full of hot air.” Using this imagery helps to amusingly but dramatically undermine the frightening aspects of fear and leads into a 10-step method for overcoming any type of anxiety. What Sedhoff does next is ingenious: After summarizing the guide in a chapter that acts as a “mini-workbook,” he illustrates in discrete chapters how the 10-step method applies to taming the fear of severe illness, death, Covid-19, and PTSD—the last included “because PTSD and the fear it elicits are so extreme, but also because it can be challenging to navigate out of.” In the final chapter the author concludes: “Unless we walk with fear and talk to it regularly, it can lead us down dangerous paths that we may not know we are taking until it is too late.” Sedhoff’s voice throughout the volume is compassionate, calming, and reassuring. The numerous, diverse examples of scared patients helped by the author add richness to the work and credibility to his methodology.
A manual that should be highly therapeutic for the fearful and anxious.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2022
ISBN: 9780994609144
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Senraan Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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