Available:*
Library | Material Type | Shelf Number | Child Count | Shelf Location | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Central | Book | 155.9 HEALING 1998 | 1 | Non-fiction Collection | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
This beautiful and sensitive book explores how people trapped in chronic illness or recovering from a catastrophic accident learn strategies of coping and healing. Here, "recovery" doesn't necessarily mean the condition disappears, but that recovery is a complex process, an act of the imagination that requires sufferers to redefine and rediscover themselves in light of the changes their health brings.The writers in this inspired collection examine their illnesses in the context of their lives, sharing personal stories about how illness affects marriage, family relationships, lifestyle, and the creative process. The Healing Circle is about the psychology, not just the physiology of recovery--what it means to be ill, what it means to be well, and what can be learned from the process of healing. Anyone facing a serious illness will value the insights found in this special book. Â Features essays from literary heavyweights including Jane Smiley, National Book Award nominee Dennis Covington, Linda Hogan, and journalist Andrew Sullivan. Â Patricia Foster and Mary Swander are both are graduates of the renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop. Â Several successful books on illnesses, such as New York Times bestsellers An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison and Drinking by Caroline Knapp, Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face; Girl Interrupted by Susan Kaysen, and countless others prove there is a significant market for books in this category.
Reviews (1)
Booklist Review
The notion of "the stages of grief" having become part of general consciousness, editors Foster and Swander promote the idea that the process of recovery and healing has definable stages, too, that should be recognized by mass culture. Recovery from serious illness or accident does not mean the condition's disappearance, they argue, but a complex series of personal definitions and rediscoveries resulting from health changes. The personal essays they present illuminate things not much known about the path of recovery, such as that illness, particularly chronic, long-term conditions, can place sufferers into "private exile," a predicament in which they must set aside the concept of recovery as a return to a safer past and develop coping attitudes and techniques that may lead to inner healing. The particular attitudes and techniques presented in the essays emphasize that life can remain an adventure, even in the face of crippling injury or AIDS, and each attitude or technique is as unique as the writer who presents it. --Whitney Scott