The Last Goodnights: Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides is an intense book that is definitely worth a read. It tells the true story of a man who helped both of his aging parents to commit suicide separately. It provides a strong argument for euthanasia, an argument worth checking out regardless of what your personal opinion is on the topic because it does give such a thought-out and personal view of the issue. It also provides insight into the degeneration of the mind as it ages and the difficulties that individuals face as they and their loved ones go through this all-too-common ordeal.

The parents of the book’s author both decided when they were younger that they would like to be in control of their own deaths when they got old. They didn’t want to suffer long and drawn out misery due to age. The father was diagnosed with a horrible form of cancer and didn’t have very long to live. He asked his adult son to assist him in committing suicide which they did together at home using the medications he’d been prescribed by his doctors. The process was very short because of the situation.

In contrast, the man’s mother was suffering from Alzheimer’s. She knew that she was degenerating, forgetting things and losing control over both mind and body. She wanted to hang on as long as possible but to never get to the point where she was living beyond what she decided she wanted to live. She also asked for her son’s help. This was a much longer process than the situation with the father and the telling of it gives terrific insight into the issue of Alzheimer’s and what people go through when this happens in their families.

The book mostly focuses on the individual’s right to what the author calls Self De-Termination and the situation surrounding the decline related to Alzheimer’s. However, it does also provide food for thought regarding this man’s own personal choices and struggle to assist his parents and the little-known fact that euthanasia may be placing pressure on adult children since it’s not allowed to be done by doctors. I’m not saying euthanasia is right or wrong; that’s not the point. The point is that the book provides a very interesting perspective.

It’s an emotionally tough read but definitely a fascinating one!

Tags: book review, books, euthanasia, john west author, last goodnights

I try to read books that cover a diverse range of different topics and styles. Mostly I choose books that are relevant to the topics that I am currently most interested in or most affected by. However, sometimes I find myself picking up books that are not related to anything that I’m doing or dealing with it right now. And sometimes those end up being the most important touching books that I read. That seems to be the case with a book I just read called Comfort: A Journey Through Grief.

This is a short book that can be a quick read if you want it to be. It’s the true first-person account of a woman who lost her five year old daughter to a sudden illness. It is about what it was like to live through the three years following her daughter’s tragic death and to come out on the other side of that, wounded and forever changed but still alive and ready to live again. It’s a tough read in the sense that it is highly emotional but it’s an easy read in the sense that it unites the writer and reader through common human emotions.

There are many things that I love about this little book but I think what grabbed my attention most of all was the writing style that was implemented in it. The author uses primarily short sentences and also uses a lot of repetition of the same facts. Sometimes these facts are repeated in the same way and sometimes they are a little bit different. The combination of repetition and short sentence structure ends up being really powerful

One of the things that happens when we lose someone is that our lives become limited to the bare minimum of things that we must get done to survive. We don’t do any extras; we barely even shower or eat. The short sentence structure of the book reflects this minimalization our lives go through during this time. And something else that happens is that we go over and over events in our minds. Sometimes we replay them word for word, again and again, trying to gain some meaning from them. Sometimes we see them through a new lens, repeating them in our minds with a new level of understanding or a new perspective on what happened. The author doesn’t actually come right out and say that these are the things that she is going through but the structure of her story reveals this side of grief.

I am not currently dealing with a major loss. I am not currently struggling with the family issues that arise when such a loss occurs. However I was still touched by this book. I can only imagine how powerful it would be for someone who was going through a tough time. This one is highly recommended!

Tags: ann hood, book recommendation, book review, books, comfort, grief books, reading

I recently had the exciting opportunity to read and review the book “Original Faith: What Your Life is Trying to Tell You” by Paul Martin as part of his book tour with Women on Writing. This book is a spiritual self help book which manages to guide the reader through his or her own murky waters by sharing spiritual insights and asking probing questions. I was particularly interested in the process of writing that Paul went through as he wrote this book. He has experienced health problems in the past and I was curious as to how this impacted his views as well as his writing experience. Answers to those questions are found in the following short interview with Paul Martin:

1. What did you consider to be the most challenging part of writing “Original Faith”?

Overall, my writing process had a sense of ease and joy. The most challenging period may have been about a year’s worth of work, in about my third year of writing, when I took a major wrong turn. Writing was becoming more and more tiresome until I realized that if I myself was bored with what I was writing… well then, who wouldn’t be bored reading it! I saw that I’d been writing from my head as uninformed by my heart and my actual lived experience – not writing creatively at all.

1. You incorporate wonderful poems at the start of each chapter. How do you feel this adds to the book (or what do you hope readers will take away from these)? And at what point in the writing stage did you add these in?

The poems’ themes anticipate each chapter’s contents, adding variety to the reading experience and helping to engage readers at the level of immediate feeling. I worked them in at the end, which was fun to do. Since these poems and many others were written concurrently with the prose, they reflect similar experiences, imagery and thoughts, which made it easy to find poems to integrate with my text.

1. You describe writing down your experiences and revelations over time as they occurred. Would you say that writing aided you in understanding your experiences or were you simply trying to recapture them for memory?

For me, the act of writing very much helped me to understand my experiences. Jogging, my work with children, meditation – and sitting at my writing table – these were the major and ongoing sources of experience and insight that generated material for Original Faith. Much book content wouldn’t have become as clear as it did and some of it wouldn’t have been created at all if not for the regular activity of sitting down to write.

Often I’d be at my desk working on one concept when I’d find myself unexpectedly struck by an insight or by especially vivid language that related to another. This aspect of the writing process was a big factor in how the manuscript came together – and what a mess my desktop was…

1. Some spiritual writers believe that it is impossible to truly articulate their beliefs although they do the best that they can in their writing. Is this something that you have struggled with at all?

Original Faith is a guide to entering into a process by which our identity changes in ways that lead us to contribute more emphatically and consistently to the well being of others, in turn bringing us greater personal fulfillment. Initially, identity moves away from being ego-based toward becoming increasingly love-based. I found that I could express this aspect of personal transformation in considerable detail and in a pretty straightforward manner.

The second identity shift that I discuss involves the transcendence of identification with one’s own love. Here I found myself having to rely a lot more on analogy and metaphor. Often the best that I could do was to use language as a kind of pointer for providing a sense of direction.

1. What is the one key thing that you would like a reader to take away from “Original Faith”?

That faith is a fact. Whether or not we connect faith with a religious belief system, each of us is profoundly at peace with what we’re doing here, with living and dying into the biggest picture, the greatest context. To know all-hope and all-trust in (to paraphrase St. Paul) “the One in whom we live and move and have our being,” is to become aware of an unconditional fact concerning who we are – a dimension of our own being that we can know with certainty. This is so whether we conceive of the One as a Creator existing in distinction from creation or as all-being, nature or reality itself.

Paul Maurice Martin is author of Original Faith: What Your Life Is Trying to Tell You and blogs at www.originalfaith.com. He holds an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School and an M.Ed. in Counseling from the University of New Hampshire.

Tags: book review, original faith, paul martin, wow book tour

My review of The Dangerous Passion (a terrific book about the biology of jealousy) was included in a really awesome Book Review blog carnival. I’ve never seen a blog carnival that was done so well. Instead of mere links, it shows you images of the book and the author with a short snippet of the review. Very well done. There were two dozen books featured in the carnival so there are a lot of great recommendations. Check it out!

Tags: blog carnival, book review, books

I have just finished reading a book called Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction which was written by Sue William Silverman. It is the first person story told as a day-by-day account of her four weeks spent as an inpatient in a sex addiction recovery treatment program. Through each day, she reflects upon the personal history that brought her to this place.

It’s an interesting memoir. Interesting is not the right word. Gripping is a better description of it.

Silverman shares the story of what it’s like to grow up in an abusive home that turns you into a victim of your own desires. She shares the experience of being a sex addict and what it did to her marriage. She shares the tales that pique the interest of the voyeuristic side of the reader.

More importantly, however, Silverman shares what it is like to be going through treatment for addiction. She shares her relapses and her fears about not getting better and her thoughts and feelings about being a person who needs to be treated for this particular problem. It gives insight into the experience of all addiction, not just sex addiction.

Powerful memoir!

Tags: book review, books, love addiction, love sick, reading, sex addiction

I recently picked up an interetsing non-fiction book from the library. It’s called The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is As Necessary As Love and Sex. As you can tell from title, it explores the idea that we have to have jealousy in our human lives. This is unique from most views on jealousy since the general thought on the topic is that jealousy is a bad thing and we need to expunge it from our personalities.

The book presents theories as to why jealousy exists. These theories are mostly rooted in the science of evolution. There have been reasons over time that it made sense to be jealous in order to protect our species. A very abbreviated version of the general theory of the book is that jealousy in the past may have prevented or deterred infidelity which increased the likelihood of successful mating and therefore the reproduction of the species.

The book points to numerous examples of this over time and suggests that this jealousy is ingrained into us at a biological / evolutionary level. It’s an interesting idea. The book takes us through a scientific exploration of what jealousy is, how it manifests itself today and what conclusions we can draw about this emotion. And it reveals the idea that jealousy does have an important place in our emotional lives even though we sometimes deny its validity.

The book can get very academic at times. It cites a lot of studies and statistics which I admittedly sometimes skimmed over because they were excessive. However, it also provides some really interesting information from a scientific perspective. It also provides neat facts about jealousy in different cultures. (I laughed aloud at the description of how Samoan women have been known to approach a woman who has had an affair with her husband and to bite her on the nose to reduce her attractiveness.) Worth taking a gander at if you’re interested in human emotion and relationships.

Tags: book recommendatino, book review, books, jealousy book, kathryn vercillo, reading

Not every book here is a book that I would recommend to others. Mostly I think that that’s something that each reader should decide for themselves. These “books of the day” are just descriptions of the books that I’m reading that will hopefully give other people an idea of some books that may interest them.

One book that I didn’t like that I recently got from the library was Lust by Elfriede Jelinek. It’s the story of a woman who is living in an abusive relationship and who ends up falling in love with another man who also turns out to have some serious issues. The story itself is pretty good and the book is one that people must have liked because it was a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

So why didn’t I like it? There were two reasons:

1. It’s translated. I don’t know what the original version sounded like but the translation felt odd to me. It’s hard to describe but it reminded me a bit of Gertrude Stein who has a great style but who I find hard to read entire books of without it feeling too dense.
2. It’s violent. Some of the abuse and sexual abuse scenes in the book were just too violent for me. I must have a weak stomach or a too-vivid imagination because I didn’t want to keep reading through them.

If those things don’t bother you, you might like the book. It’s certainly unique and it does have a story to tell.

Tags: book review, books, elfriede jelinek, kathryn vercillo, lust, reading

I wish that I was a bigger fan of Jack Kerouac than I am. I’ve read a lot of biographical stuff about him and he seems like a fascinating character. I like the ideas behind his work. But for some reason I’ve just never been turned on by his writing style.

Nevertheless, I pick up books by him now and then and try to give him another chance. One of the ones that I did that with recently was Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha. I’ll be honest in saying that it didn’t capture my attention through the entire book. I have no problem putting down books that I’m not loving and that’s what I did with this one.

However, I did like this book more than some of his others and I think it’s an intriguing read for people who like Kerouac’s style and who also have an itnerest in Buddhism. It’s basically Kerouac’s version of the story of Siddhartha which is a key story that helps people understand the basics of Buddhism.

Definitely a book to consider even if I didn’t ultimately decide to finish it!

Tags: book recommendation, book review, books, buddha, kathryn vercillo, kerouac, reading, wake up

Usually if a book has a long title and subtitle then I shorten it when describing it. However, I feel like today’s book of the day is so aptly described by it’s lengthy title that it makes sense to use the whole thing:

Relax – You May Only Have a Few Minutes Left: Using the Power of Humor to Overcome Stress in Your Life and Work. 

This book is by Loretta LaRoche. In the beginning of it, she offers up ten ways that you can get outside of your own head and learn to be positive instead of negative:

1. Stop frowning; start smiling.
2. Use fun self-talk.
3. Be helpful to someone else in life.
4. Listen to yourself.
5. Be indulgent with yourself.
6. Use your creativity and imagination.
7. Unclutter your life.
8. “Tap into the universe of humor”.
9. Be different from the norm.
10. Work on tolerance and gratitude.

The book basically covers thoughts and tips related to these things. It’s one of those easy-to-read books that uses simple expression to allow you to think about your life in a more positive way. A good read if you’re looking for quick tips on being more positive in your life. Couldn’t we all use that?

Tags: book recommendation, book review, books, inspirational books, laroche, reading

I mentioned yesterday that I love checking out a lot of different art books from the library. I have also mentioned in the past that I’m really interested in altered art and collage. So it’s probably no surprise to anyone that I got a bunch of altered art books from the library recently.

3 books that I’d recommend from this bunch are:

• Altered Books Workshop by Bev Brazelton. This one covers over a dozen different techniques for doing altered book art. It’s pretty basic and good for beginners but could be helpful to established altered art artists too. Plus it has great pictures that I felt were inspiring to create my own art off of.
• Altered Art: Techniques for Creating Altered Books, Boxes, Cards & More by Terry Taylor. This one is great because it offers information about how to alter a lot of different types of objects so you can learn to repurpose many different things into art.
• Collage, Assemblage, and Altered Art: Creating Unique Images and Objects by Diane Maurer-Mathison. This emphasizes collage art which is something that I really enjoy. There are a lot of great gallery pictures here to look at for inspiration.

I’m a big fan of altered art books. Do you have any others to recommend to me?

Tags: altered art, altered art books, art books, book recommendation, book review, books, collage art, kathryn vercillo, reading