A feel-good story for like-minded readers who also seek “the love and compassion of the Universe.”
How the author “left medicine to pursue a radically different path,” as she embarked on “the messy process of finding my connection to the Divine and learning to trust its guidance.”
Fans of Seidelmann’s previous work (Born to Freak: A Salty Primer for Irrepressible Humans, 2012, etc.) will surely enjoy this chronicle of the author’s chaotic transformation from a fourth-generation physician to a shamanic healer and life coach. The author details her travels around the globe, including sojourns to South Africa, India, and the California desert, searching for her inner shaman. After one shamanic workshop, the author returned home intent on decluttering her house. “As I let go of more and more layers,” she writes, “I felt better and better. I found that I could appreciate and engage with the things that remained. Thank you, wonderful salad bowl! Thank you, beloved grey sweater!” This book will appeal most to readers who can relate to those sentiments or have strong feelings about spirit animals, ghosts, disembodied spirits, and palo santo incense. For others, the narrative will be a slog, as the author’s constant inner turmoil and self-reflection become tiresome (“I frequently thought to myself: What have I done?”) and offer few lasting insights for those not undergoing similar experiences. Seidelmann wasn’t the only member of the family seeking a more meaningful life. Her husband, also a physician, began his own journey, and during his vision quest he “focuse[d] on awakening a potential primal energy lying coiled like a serpent at the base of his spine.” The author’s prose is serviceable, but depending on each reader’s tolerance for New Age spiritualism, the narrative will either produce maddening impatience or intense curiosity.
A feel-good story for like-minded readers who also seek “the love and compassion of the Universe.”Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-57324-701-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Conari Press
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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