A practical and warmly reassuring guide to fortifying the body and mind for the fight of a lifetime.
Zinggrebe presents a wide-ranging primer that asserts the health benefits of alternative medicine, meditation, a proper diet, and spiritual growth.
The author, a German physician and life coach who founded a nutritional supplements company,revisits his struggle at the age of 40 with lymphoid cancer, which he survived despite a dire prognosis in 2017. He underwent conventional chemotherapy, but he also attributes his recovery to a “toolkit” of alternative therapies, lifestyle changes, and other practices. His regimen included simple meditation and breathing exercises that relieved stress, anxiety, and depression; visualization exercises in which he imagined scenes of medications killing cancer cells and doctors telling him he was cured; verbal affirmations, proclaiming the effectiveness of healing processes; law-of-attraction drills in which he practiced emotions of certitude while contemplating goals; and “power moves” that expressively mimed robust health: “I stretch both arms up to the sky, splaying my fingers and making myself look as tall as possible,” he explains of his own power move. “I then stick my chest out and hit my chest with my fists firmly twice.” Zinggrebe also recommends moderate exercise, fasting for 16 hours a day, and nutritional supplements, including vitamin D and polyphenols such as curcumin. He also has practical tips for cancer patients, from searching questions to ask doctors—“If your son, your mother, your partner or you were sitting here instead of me today, what treatment would you recommend to them?”—to the importance of noteating favorite foods before chemotherapy because the ensuing nausea may put one off them. Later chapters survey other healing modalities, including sessions with a medium.
Zinggrebe’s treatise is aimed at patients facing new cancer diagnoses who feel understandable panic and disorientation; he knows this terrain well and writes about it in moving, evocative prose: “On the outside, I had plenty to keep me busy. But on the inside, I was slowly collapsing….I asked myself if there was even any point to life now that I had nothing left to give and I found myself capable of doing less and less.” The author provides lucid, easy-to-follow instructions for various therapeutic exercises and explains the scientific rationales behind them, as when he writes of an activity that he says will “activate your parasympathetic nervous system considerably and sink your blood pressure and heart rate.” Much of the book is a searching disquisition of the influence of the psyche on the body, and Zinggrebe writes about it in rich, colorful language that makes the topic feel accessible, even playful: “imagine the actual radiation as…brightly colored rays of energy whose only mission is to attack harmful cells,” he suggests in a passage on visualizing successful radiation treatments. “You can picture [cancer cells as] the bad guys in a movie, clinging to the abyss with their last ounce of strength before falling to their death.” Cancer patients interested in exploring nontraditional approaches to treatment will find much intriguing and hopeful information here.
A practical and warmly reassuring guide to fortifying the body and mind for the fight of a lifetime.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9783982611143
Page Count: 326
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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