Reviews for Ideal Healer and Healing Suggestions

The average rating for Ideal Healer and Healing Suggestions based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-09-29 00:00:00 Joseph Ledue A friend sent me a copy of this essay when Elisabeth Wynhausen died after a short battle with a horrible cancer earlier this year. I loved the brevity and poignancy of this MUP series of "Little Books on Big Things", and there's an added poignancy in reading a writer's work after their death. By then, it's a kind of immortality - Dorothy Porter wrote about this in "On Passion," her own essay for this series. "There is something very unsettling about a book," she wrote. "Uncanny. A book written by a dead author - and most are (indeed there will come a time when I'm a dead author myself) - is nothing less than a haunted house, which lures the reader into conversation with a loquacious, enchanting ghost, We forget how mysterious, verging on the supernatural, reading is." To read Elisabeth Wynhausen On Resilience was to feel like I'd been given one last chance of at least over-hearing one of her conversations - I relished the clarity and elegance of her sentences, and I relished her pragmatic and eloquent examination of what resilience looks like, and her determined nod to the science that suggests that, thanks to several variations in the 5-HTT gene, certain people are "predisposed to be resilient". Behind its title, the book is often a meditation on the life and death of her own mother - it is moving, it is honouring, and it is inspiring. And it's something to read Wynhausen's writing of the end of one resilient woman's life now also in the context of her own.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-16 00:00:00 Jony Sam When I picked this book up from the library I marveled at how small it was; I knew it was not a long read but as I examined this pocket sized book, I certainly was taken back. Yet, within it's pages lies a touching, thoughtful account of experiences within Wynhausen's family and those beloved by them. Furthermore, as the title suggests, it examines what constitutes resilience in relation to research, media, and personal life. While I would not call this book perfect, it certainly touches on some important ideas and experiences surrounding a concept that can at times feel obscure, intangible. More importantly, Wynhausen tackles this subject beautifully, with heart, humor and insight. This is certainly a book worth a look for those interested in the human condition.