GIFT IDEAS
CANCER AND THE NEW BIOLOGY OF WATER Why the War on Cancer Has Failed and What That Means for More Effective Prevention and Treatment Thomas Cowan, Chelsea Green Publishing (SEP 24) Hardcover $24.95 (208pp), 978-1-60358-881-2 HEALTH & FITNESS
Cancer statistics are grim: one in two men and one in three women will get the disease in their lifetime. Ever more frightening is that no one in the medical industry has a decent explanation for why the incidence of cancer has increased ten-fold over the past hundred years. On the bright side, oncologists are better at treating the disease, if caught early, but cancer that has progressed to Stage 3 or beyond is a crapshoot, and even after what seems to be successful treatment, the odds of it returning in a handful of years are exceptionally high. Oh, and after fifty years and dozens of billions of dollars, oncologists are legally bound to use the same surgery/ chemotherapy/radiation “standard of care” that hampers but doesn’t terminate the disease.
In Cancer and the New Biology of Water, Thomas Cowan presents a lengthy list of promising alternatives and complements to the standard treatment. Moreover, he details a radical new theory about how the state of the water in our cells greatly affects overall health. He writes, “The thrust of this book is that the structure and integrity of intracellular water is fundamental to the health of our cells, tissues, and our entire organism. This structure and integrity impacts cell division, transcription and translation of DNA for protein synthesis, energy generation, the charge of the cell, and is the receptor mechanism for everything from hormones and neurotransmitters to thoughts and emotions.” In other words, poor intracellular water is a welcome mat to cancer.
As in his two other important books, Cowan’s writing is compelling and eminently hopeful.
UNFORGETTABLE PORTRAITS Rosamund Kidman Cox Firefly Books (SEP 1) Hardcover $29.95 (128pp) 978-0-228-10183-3, PHOTOGRAPHY
A wildlife photo brings to hand what rightfully belongs in the secretive haunts of untamed wilderness. The best of those photos capture an animal in its natural habitat acting true to its nature. And quite often, as voyeurs, we humans are left in a mindless, awed state. These photos defy words, and a book of such images serves to paralyze the conscientious reviewer with a blinkered type of writer’s block.
Unforgettable Portraits is exactly that: a stupefying collection of animal portraits and images sourced from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest, a fifty-three-yearand-running competition owned by London’s Natural History Museum. Snow leopard, anaconda, wolverine, Dalmatian pelican, Peringuey’s adder, Atlantic wolffish, Philippine eagle, pot-bellied seahorse, kingfisher, blue shark, American bison, Komodo dragon, sperm whale, fennec fox, and dozens of others—exotic plants and insects included—make uncanny appearances, with each photo earning a brief story describing how the moment came to be. Rarely a serendipitous snapshot, often the photographers invest days waiting for the exact set of circumstances to line up. Unforgettable portraits, yes. Your coffee table should be so lucky.
HOW TO CATCH A MOLE Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature Marc Hamer, Greystone Books (OCT 1) Hardcover $24.95 (256pp) 978-1-77164-479-2, NATURE
Quantum physics recognizes that electrons behave differently when under observation—to be, or not to be, a wave or a particle, depending on whether it’s being observed. And nature writing presents a similar situation because nature writers, as observers, must abide the fact that they themselves are an element of nature. To be human in nature is to become nature. The point is that nature writing is always part memoir. Welshman Marc Hamer embraces his inner autobiographer in this visionary writing project, and showcases the extraordinary roles he played over a lifetime spent primarily in the rural outdoors— observer, student, inhabitant, celebrant, professional gardener, and reluctant mercenary: “I had to work to depersonalise the moles, because if, as I believe, all living things have equal value and we are all the same, then I was killing myself.” He also provides a lovely anthem to that garden ravager, the mole, a far more interesting, intrepid creature than is commonly known. He writes movingly of marital love, solitude, weather, and, of aging, he says, “In decay I see the beginning of growth, because that is how I choose to see the world, because it makes the world elegant and poetic; because I have no religion; because I am a gardener and I see it every day.” Nature writing par excellence, discovering Hamer is a godsend.
BIG WONDERFUL THING A History of Texas Stephen Harrigan, University of Texas Press (OCT 1) Hardcover $35 (944pp), 978-0-292-75951-0 HISTORY
Ablaze in infamy and otherworldly as any heavenly planet, Texas is mythology come alive. This singular place is what happens when fiercely independent, prone-to-violence people are assimilated into a fledgling nation whose capital is so remote in distance and ideology as to exert little influence. Indeed, in seeking to understand our twenty-eighth state, perhaps it is most important to keep in mind that Texas is attached by a lengthy, porous border and centuries of history with sovereign Mexico.
Henry David Thoreau’s maxim that “most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important” offers a prescient introduction to Stephen Harrigan’s 944-page Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas, in that none and all of the events he retells define Texas perfectly. A longtime writer for Texas Monthly and the author of two historical novels based in Texas, Harrigan uses his stupendous storytelling skills to great effect. He covers the state’s major historical events from inventive angles, introduces newly discovered archaeological and archival research, and excels at puffing up many of Texas’s largerthan-life personalities, including Santa Anna, Jane Long, Stephen Austin, Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, Georgia O’keefe, Pancho Villa, Lyndon Johnson, Dorie Miller, Barbara Jordan, Larry Mcmurtry, George W. Bush, and Lizzie Davis, as well as buffalo soldiers, Comanches and Apaches, and a motley mess of others.
MEISTER ECKHART’S BOOK OF SECRETS Meditations on Letting Go and Finding True Freedom Mark S. Burrows, Jon M. Sweeney, Hampton Roads Publishing (OCT 1) Softcover $16.95 (240pp) 978-1-57174-847-8, RELIGION
Medieval Europe isn’t recognized for being particularly adventurous in spiritual matters. Dank monasteries, cavernous cathedrals, and plague pandemics seemed to stoicize the mind, apparently. Though not in the case of Johannes Eckhart, a thirteenth-century Dominican theologian who wrote in German and transcended his era with brilliant treatises on seeking peace of mind, contentment, and absolute freedom through the process of letting go of desires:
If you want to reach the highest wisdom, refuse everything you know, abandon all you aspire to be, and seek the darkness of the lowest place of all. Become nothing, and there God will pour out the whole of himself, who is All, with all his strength, and you will see in the light you long for.
Christian through and through, with a mystical bent, Eckhart earned a following from names like Erich Fromm, D. T. Suzuki, Rudolf Steiner, and Richard Rohr, among many others across the religious spectrum. This superb new translation modernizes Eckhart’s writings into short poems for contemporary seekers. In their introduction, Mark Burrows and Jon Sweeney invite readers to discover the secrets of the Meister’s teachings, which draw “on perennial truths that point to what Eckhart called the ‘pathless path,’ which alone can lead us into true freedom.”