An engrossing, inspirational call for a medicine that takes the soul as seriously as the body.
A doctor explores a world of treatments beyond pharmaceuticals and surgery in this searching investigation of wellness.
Kalaichandran, a pediatrician and journalist, starts by revisiting her travails working at an Ontario hospital where, she says, the hostility of senior staff caused her to develop anxiety, depression, and high cholesterol levels. The ordeal prompted her to research connections between mental and physical healing and embark on a tour of alternate therapies. The journey took her to a yoga training retreat in Mexico; a mass hypnosis session, which opened insights into the placebo effect (fake surgeries can be as effective as real ones in alleviating orthopedic pain and disability, she reports); new foods (she adopted the Mediterranean and Portfolio Diets and light fasting); and a trip on MDMA—ecstasy—to see whether psychedelics really do alleviate intractable mental problems. (As advertised, the experience showed her “a side to our existence that felt sublime and…connected to the larger universe,” she writes.) Kalaichandran also probes darker aspects of the medical profession that contribute to the unhappiness of doctors. These include residents’ sleep deprivation from 24-hour shifts (the practice was popularized by a cocaine-addicted surgeon, she notes), toxic hospital office politics, and bullying campaigns conducted by powerful doctors against underlings because of personal grudges, racism, and sexism—a dynamic that she credits with causing her own mental health issues. Kalaichandran presents a lucid, nuanced account of the science behind the unconventional ideas she explored amid an intricate analysis of social and psychological determinants of disease, drawing on observations of her own patients. Beyond the lucid exposition of studies and theories, there’s an evocative, spiritual richness in her prose, as when, for example, she analyzes the importance of accepting the inevitable through a plangent recollection of a patient dying of cancer: “And so, Priya had passed away, as a slow withering out of this world, while her mother fought her own resistance around letting go among the machines and cords and fluorescent lights of a small ICU room.” The result is a fascinating, hopeful meditation on sickness and recovery.
An engrossing, inspirational call for a medicine that takes the soul as seriously as the body.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781956474558
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Heliotrope Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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