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
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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