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Archive for the ‘books’ Category

The Witch of Portobello

Posted in books, from the reading room, life on June 25, 2007| 4 Comments »

The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho. ISBN 978-0-00-725184-1

If you enjoy the work of Paulo Coelho, and I am someone who does, then you will enjoy his latest book. He has created a very distinct style for himself. As a reader you know what to expect and you’re not disappointed. Mind you, having worked as a General Practitioner in Portobello, Edinburgh until I took up my current post, I was disappointed that the book wasn’t set there! There’s plenty to enjoy and lots to think about in this novel. Let me focus on the idea of the witch because that is fundamental to the whole work. On page 13 he describes four archetypes of women –

  • Virgin
  • Martyr
  • Saint
  • Witch

What really got me thinking here was his description of the path to enlightenment characteristic of each of these archetypes –

  • Virgin – Independence
  • Martyr – Suffering
  • Saint – Unconditional Love
  • Witch – Pleasure

Do you recognise these archetypes? I don’t think they are exclusive to women. As with all archetypes of the psyche I think each of us resonate with them to greater and lesser extents. It’s unusual to find someone who can be fully described by a single archetype. So which of these do you resonate with? And how can you play to your strengths then?

Like all Paulo Coelho’s books, this is a story of self-discovery and how to find your own way in life.

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What would you like to win?

Posted in books, from the reading room, health, life, philosophy on June 14, 2007| 3 Comments »

Here’s a quote from The Conqueror by Jan Kjaerstad

Supposing one were a conqueror – what would one win? The world? A little peace of mind? A name? Immortality? Oneself? Power? Women? There were times in Jonas Wergeland’s life when he felt there was only one thing worth striving for: health. To be fit and well.

What do you think? Do you agree with Jonas? What do YOU think is worth striving for?

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The Conqueror by Jan Kjaerstad

Posted in books, from the reading room, narrative on June 13, 2007| 5 Comments »

ISBN 1-905147-16-3. The Conqueror is the second in a trilogy by Norwegian author Jan Kjaerstad. The first volume, The Seducer, certainly seduced me. I read it when the English translation was published in 2003. That first volume hooked me before I even opened the book. On the back cover the blurb begins

So how do the pieces of a life fit together? Or, to put it another way: do they fit together at all?

Well, this is an idea which really intrigues me. I often think we have so many roles, so many aspects, so many threads running in our lives that it’s quite a challenge to see how it all fits together. Every time I sit with a new patient I’m doing the same thing – collecting the pieces of their lives, the fragments of their stories and trying to piece it all together, to make sense of it. The novel tells the story of one Jonas Wergeland, a famous Norwegian TV producer who arrives home to find his wife dead on the lounge floor. Shot. He is arrested and charged with her murder. The whole of the 600 pages of that first volume is made up of dozens of stories that try to explain how Jonas ended up at this juncture. By the end of the book we don’t know if he has been found guilty. The quality of the writing and the way he built up an understanding of Jonas by the telling of multiple stories of his life completely enthralled me. It’s taken four years to get volume two, The Conqueror, translated into English.

In The Conqueror we are made aware that Jonas has indeed been found guilty and Jan Kjaerstad uses the same technique to try to explain how a great TV producer, revered by a whole nation, could end up killing his wife. Here are a couple of lines from The Conqueror that will explain why this book so captures me as a reader

Maybe our existence is best understood as a story.

I don’t know any other way to understand either my existence or that of another. We construct ourselves and we communicate our private subjective unique experience of living through telling stories.

 For so it is: even though life is lived forward, it is always understood backward. You turn around and behold – in awe or fear – a pattern that you are not aware of having made.

Isn’t that so true? This man writes beautifully. I find his novels totally addictive. And how long will it be until the third and last part of this trilogy comes out in English? I suspect it’ll be around 2011! Well, you know what? I’ll content myself with a re-read or two of The Seducer AND The Conqueror while I wait!

There are many lines in The Conqueror that I’ve noted down and want to say something about. I’ll take them individually in separate posts (first of all over the next few days, then, probably, as I re-read these books, over the next few months). If you love stories, layers and layers of stories that develop an understanding of a person’s life, and you love good writing, I’d recommend you buy these novels and treat yourself.

This blog is titled “Heroes Not Zombies” because I have this belief that most of us sleepwalk through most of our lives, on automatic pilot, and that life can be better for any of us if we wake up, become more aware, more reflective and more creative. In short, the best kind of life is the one where we are the heroes of our own unique stories. Here’s Jan Kjaerstad again

Because most heroic tales can awaken forces which until then have lain fettered inside a person.

The BIG work of the main character of these novels, Jonas the TV producer, is his documentary series on Great Norwegians. As each episode is described, another Norwegian hero’s life and significance is manifested to the whole, hooked nation. Norwegians are described in the novels as a nation of spectators and the spectacle of this series on national heroes is what makes Jonas’ reputation. Every episode captured my imagination so much that I swung between wishing the series had been real so I could actually buy the DVD and watch it, and feeling I had seen and heard every detail in the author’s wonderful descriptions anyway.

This is a book which will make you think. It’ll make you think about stories and how we use them to understand ourselves and others. It’ll make you think this

But no occurrence, no day in a person’s life is so trivial that it might not be crucial. Important things happen all the time………all days are in a way, holy days.

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Meaning-full Disease

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health on May 14, 2007| 6 Comments »

Meaning-full Disease. Brian Broom
ISBN 978-1-85575-463-8

I read a reference to Brian Broom’s work in “Why Do People Get Ill?“, and like that book, his “Meaning-full Disease” should go on every doctor and would-be doctor’s reading list – not just on their shelves, but in their active reading list. Professor Broom leads the post-graduate programme in MindBody Healthcare at Auckland University of Technology and works as a physician specialising in allergies and clinical immunology, a psychotherapist and a mindbody specialist in Christchurch. That tells you something about what you might expect from this book. His main area of interest is psychosomatic disease. This is a term which has fallen out of favour and come to mean illnesses without any associated physical disease. However, it is making a comeback thanks to work like this and Leader and Corfield‘s work amongst others. It is particularly making a comeback because of its focus on the links between the body and the mind in illnesses where there are significant pathological changes to be found.
Broom explores the truly fascinating observations that patients’ physical diseases are often best understood by uncovering the meanings that their illnesses have for them. He pleas for a more holistic, more humane practice of medicine by placing the scientific world view in its rightful place – not as the bearer of all truth, but as a subset of experience.

“the lifeworld is a rich, multidimensional, experienced reality of which the scientific world is a part-representation, a reduction, or an abstraction.”

He sets out a powerful argument for seeing both subjective and objective experience as different manifestations of an underlying unified phenomenon, referring to both phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, and Japanese writers, Yasua and Ichikowa (the latter he quotes as saying “my ‘object-body’ and my ‘subject-body’ are inseparably united in their deeper layer, and cannot be separated clearly and decisively, except through intellectual abstraction”. I particularly enjoyed his reflections on this so-called divide between objective and subjective where he says to touch your left hand with your right – as you do this you experience you left hand objectively and in the same moment subjectively your left hand feels touched. He goes on to muse about the position of hands pressed together in prayer which similarly dissolves the barriers between subjective and objective. A lovely image and a nice way to get us thinking about these two ways of experiencing the world.
There is much more to illness than the biomedical model elucidates for us. This in no way devalues the model which is still a powerful way to not only conceptualise disease but to treat it, but trying to understand a person’s whole experience by seeking what lies behind the pathology requires quite other skills which doctors are sadly not so strongly encouraged to acquire. One of the best passages in Professor Broom’s book is where he describes the process of his work moving back and forth in a consultation between the “thing of the illness and it’s meaning”. Sounds like how a consultation should be.

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Phantoms in the Brain

Posted in books, from the reading room, neuroscience, perception on March 25, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Phantoms in the Brain by Sandra Blakeslee and V.S. Ramachandran (ISBN 1-85702-895-3). Ramachandran is a specialist in brain research and I’ve both read some his previous writings and have often seen him referred to by other neuroscientists. His particular interest is in perception which he researches from a neurological perspective. The mechanisms of perception are much more complex than they seem. Take vision for instance. Many people have a vague idea that the way we see things is by light passing through the lenses of eyes, setting off some kind of impulses down the nerve fibres which connect to the backs of our eyes (the retina, which is made of of cells called rods and cones). These signals are then sent to brain, maybe you even know that they go to an area of the brain called the visual cortex. I guess many people who even know this much think of a kind of screen on the back of the brain where the images are projected, a bit like being at the cinema. It doesn’t take long however to figure out that this can’t be right. Who’s watching the screen? And how do “they” turn what they “see” into an image? No, it’s more complicated. In fact, creating an visual image involves some 30 distinct areas of the brain all working together! Ramachandran is great at explaining this kind of thing and in his book he covers not only vision, but all kinds of perception, discussing phantom limbs, memory, emotions and beliefs. He even has a chapter entitled “The Zombie in the Brain” about some of the automatic functions of the brain that go on below the level of conscious awareness.

There’s not much new in this book. If you’ve read works by Antonio Damasio (Looking for Spinoza, Descartes’ Error and The Feeling of What Happens) and Oliver Sacks (The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, Awakenings) you’ll be familiar with most of the issues explained here. However, if you’ve never read anything about perception and the brain before this would be an easy and informative place to start.

One thing that really strikes me about these neuroscientists is how important individual experiences are to them. Ramachandran declares this at the outset. He says –

“More was learned about memory from a few days of studying a patient called H.M. than was gleaned from previous decades of research averaging data on many subjects.”

Individual case reports, case studies, real peoples’ stories, are dismissed by many scientists as anecdotes (and they never mean that as a compliment!), but in cutting the human uniqueness out of research conducted on groups of people and concentrating only on what is in common, on what the statistical averages show, learning is impeded. The “Evidence Based Medicine” movement (“EBM”) has created a whole hierarchy of evidence that tends to rate what is found in common (group trials and reviews of groups of group trials) much more highly than individual experiences of patients and their doctors. I understand that this method can throw some light on the usefulness of certain therapeutic interventions but unless we consider individual experiences our understanding will remain unnecessarily limited. Ramachandran points out that if I show you a talking pig, you’ll say “how amazing!”, you won’t say “Oh yes, show me more talking pigs then I’ll be interested!”

So that’s what I liked best about this book. It is scientific, easy to read, and based on the real experiences of real people. Individual human beings are completely fascinating and their stories are frequently utterly amazing. Phantoms in the Brain is full of amazing stories and after reading it you’ll never think about perception the same way again.

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