Category Archives: Reviews

Climbing Maya

Climbing Maya: An Exploration into Success

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Ken La Salle
Solstice Publishing, 2012
ISBN 9781477531853
Reviewed by Patricia Wellingham-Jones

Synopsis: A man explores the meaning of success from a wide range of perspectives.

When Ken La Salle was fired from his job as a marketing writer, he decided to find out what success really meant, as he felt very far from that ideal. This memoir is a description of the months following his unemployment, his friendships with two men important in his life, and the woman who’d been his wife only a few months but was the acme of acceptance and support. A key person in the story was Megan, friend Sean’s wife and dying of leukemia, who turns out to have had much to teach Ken.

Ken La Salle had a bent for philosophy, starting with a Christian childhood then moving on to study ideas and religions of the centuries, winding up with Buddhism being the most workable belief system for him. He didn’t accept the dictionary definitions of success: achieving certain goals or acquiring wealth or position. Surely, true success in a life meant more than that.

In this readable excursion into thought and meaning, combining the wisdom of the kundalini, Maslow, and others, Ken La Salle provides information in what ultimately forms the successful life that might prove helpful to the questing reader.

Receive a Free Copy of RTS Parenting (October, 2011)

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Loving Healing Press wants to allow the most dedicated readers of

    Recovering The Self: A Journal of Hope and Healing

the opportunity to earn a free copy of the journal’s most recent “Parenting” issue.

To take advantage of our offering, all we ask of you is that you read our one-of-a-kind publication and write a short (450-600 words) review about the issue. We do not require you to be a literary genius or have any writing experience at all. We simply want real opinions from our beloved readers.

If you are interested in submitting a review for

    Recovering the Self: A Journal of Hope and Healing

(October, 2011) please email marketing@recoveringself.com with your full name, present mailing address and a short message indicating that you wish to write a review. We will only be selecting a limited number of submissions, so get yours in quickly!

Maisie Dobbs (2004)

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Maisie Dobbs (Book 1)

Maisie Dobbs (Book 1)

Jacqueline Winspear
Penguin Books, 2004
ISBN-13: 9780142004333
Reviewed by Patricia Wellingham-Jones

Synopsis: The Agatha Award winner for Best First Novel 2003, Maisie Dobbs is the beginning of a series about a young woman in post-World War I London who sets herself up in business as a Psychologist and Investigator.

Although it seems strange to consider mysteries from a healing perspective, these novels are very much focused on that. I started the series in the middle and found myself hooked. Finally, after reading book seven (book eight is now out), I read this one, the first in line which introduces Maisie Dobbs, as a woman in 1929 and as the girl in the back story who struggled to get there. Maisie was 13 when her mother died and her father arranged for her to go into service as a maid to a wealthy family. Her life changed again when Lady Rowan Compton discovered her reading in the black of night in the manor’s library, greedily absorbing knowledge about anything that caught her interest. Instead of being dismissed, as she’d expected, Maisie was supported in learning by Lady Rowan and a family friend, Dr. Maurice Blanche, revered for his investigative work with Scotland Yard.

She started her advanced studies at Girton College, Cambridge, but The Great War, 1914-1918, put an end to that. Maisie instead became a nurse and was shipped to the battlefields of France. She experienced horrors that haunted her dreams as did the soldiers who survived. After the war, she returned to Girton; then became Dr. Blanche’s apprentice. When he retired to the countryside of Kent, a place that holds almost as much importance as any character in the stories, she opened her own business as Psychologist and Investigator on Roylston Square in London. The big case in this first book, a tedious-sounding infidelity, took her right back into the memories and aftermaths of that war.

I find the character of Maisie sympathetic in her thoughtfulness and determination to do all she can to restore equilibrium in the people whose lives she disrupts; I like most of the other characters, too. The writing feels true to the era, the details fascinating, and the plight of a generation of single women whose men were killed or permanently damaged clearly illustrated. Maisie uses her psychological training to unearth villains and set affairs right. The later books in the series get even better –or maybe I just plain like Maisie Dobbs and her world.

 

The Music Room: A memoir (2009)

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The Music Room

The Music Room: A memoir

William Fiennes
W.W. Norton & Co., 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-07258-7
Reviewer: Patricia Wellingham-Jones

Synopsis: William Fiennes grew up in a 700-year-old castle near Oxford, England, in a loving family, overshadowed by an older brother with epilepsy and brain damage.

Richard was 11 years old and already suffering from epilepsy when William was born. Younger brother looked up to and adored older brother, accepting the sudden mood swings, violent outbreaks, and lost memory as just Richard. William didn’t imagine Rich’s behavior as part of a disease. “That would have implied the existence of an ideal healthy Richard… But there wasn’t any other Richard.” He grew older and recognized that he would outgrow childish behavior but Richard was stuck there forever.

Dad and Mum are the true heroes of the story in my view. They did what was necessary to maintain the old castle passed down in the family since the 14th century –tours including a tea shop three times a week, hosting local fairs and celebrations, allowing use of the castle for movie making (William remembers Jane Seymour in Regency costume sniffing roses in their garden), doing the physical chores an ancient building requires, and still exuding love and acceptance to their entire family, and especially the difficult and brain-damaged eldest son.

William Fiennes’ writing is lyrical; you can feel the love he has for his home as he describes his boyhood activities: fishing in the moat, learning to ride a bicycle in the Great Room, trailing his father all over the estate, watching Richard cut down the annual Christmas tree. Much of the book entails research reports and case studies of electricity in the human brain starting from the earliest findings to the present. While interesting, this distracts from the human story and adds a remoteness that distances. Of course, this is an upper-class British family being described and overt emotions are not a large part of their existence. One of the most revealing scenes is this:

One afternoon I saw Dad standing next to the house, his right arm stretched out, palm pressed flat against a buttress, his head dropped. He didn’t move.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He said he was asking the house for some of its strength.

The Music Room is not healing in the sense that someone gets better, but the depth of love and acceptance of all family members, especially the beleaguered parents, touches the soul of the reader.