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Thursday, 1 Apr 2010
WIN one of 10 copies of Kitchen Table Wisdom. Simply email us with your name and address details.
Competition closes: Friday, May 28, 2010.
Review by Sarah Johnson
Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen laments the lost art of kitchen table wisdom: the simple act of sharing stories of life experience. “Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time,” writes Dr. Remen. “It is the way wisdom gets passed along.” It was how she spent many cherished Sunday afternoons with her grandfather.
To show us the power of this simple exchange, Dr. Remen extended her kitchen table to seat an ever-growing guest list by writing a book of stories: stories gathered from her life as a granddaughter and daughter; as a doctor of medicine for nearly 50 years; as a counsellor of people with life-threatening illnesses; and from her own personal experience of living with Crohn's disease.
Initially, writing Kitchen Table Wisdom (Pan Macmillan Australia) came as somewhat of a surprise to Dr. Remen. As she reveals in her book, a friend encouraged her to send “a single little story” she had written to his book agent, who then sold it to a publisher. Before she knew it, Dr. Remen had begun writing a book of stories, without fully understanding what the book was about or where it would lead.
This type of book went against the grain of a physician who in the world of medicine had been trained to value only proven data, as opposed to anecdotal evidence. Yet since her book was first published more than ten years ago, Dr. Remen has learnt otherwise:
“I had no idea what it would come to mean to people, about the way it would reach people and strengthen them, the way it would touch people and make them feel less alone. I have discovered the power of a story to change people.”
Kitchen Table Wisdom is a book that opens your mind to the wonder and possibility of life. To its mystery. To understand that we don't understand all that happens. Such as the story of the cardiologist's father who had Alzheimer's disease. He was completely dependent on his wife's care and hadn't spoken in ten years, yet just before he died, he spoke the words, “...Tell your mother that I love her. Tell her that I'm all right.”
Kitchen Table Wisdom so allows you to contemplate a new perspective on healing. For those that lay all their hopes within the realm of medicine, Dr. Remen explores the idea that we are all innately capable of healing – to heal ourselves and to heal others. Her stories give an intimate insight into how people approach sickness; how they have embraced life and faced death and how our beliefs “can hold us hostage”. The latter has been personally true for Dr. Remen who was told that she would not live beyond 40 years of age. As a result she did not marry or have children. She writes, “...we may become as wounded by the way in which we see an illness as by the illness itself. Belief traps or frees us.”
Her book also delves into life wisdoms beyond healing. She explores the concepts of self-judgement; and perfection (“it's an addiction of our time”); of courage (“It often means being afraid and doing it anyway”); and loss (“if we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us”); of expectations; and listening (“I suspect that the most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen”).
Kitchen Table Wisdom is a book to be read and then read again. It holds so many jewels of wisdom, that it's not possible to see the beauty in all of them in the first reading. It's also a book to be shared; just as we once shared stories around the kitchen table.
Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, is clinical professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine and founder and director of the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness at Commonweal. She is one of the earliest pioneers of holistic and integrative medicine, and as a medical educator and reformer, Dr Remen has trained many thousands of physicians to practice medicine from the heart. Her groundbreaking curriculum The Healer's Art is taught in nearly half of America's medical schools. Dr Remen has had Crohn's disease for more than 50 years, and her work is a unique blend of the viewpoints of physician and patient.
Visit her website
For more information about the book, click here.
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