My Book Reviews

  We are not islands cut off from one another.  We are relational creatures whose selfhood or identity is mediated through interaction with others and the world in which we all exist.  The Self is not immediately explicit to itself as it needs others to mediate its self-awareness.  We have all read, or at least heard, the lines from Meditation XVII by John Donne (1572–1631) which go: No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. I write this rather long introduction because of our shared humanity, and our individual identity, which ultimately depends on that shared humanity.  Our identity evolves over tim...

Voices have always haunted me, especially voices that call out for help.   As a child, I was enchanted by the recorded dream of our national patron, St. Patrick , a 5th-century Roman-British missionary, who felt called back to Ireland by "the voice of the Irish” pleading with him in a visionary dream.   These were the people whom he had once been enslaved by, and they now appeared to be begging him to return and walk among them again.   Furthermore, the last pleading words of Sal Mineo (1939 – 1976), who was twice nominated for best supporting actor at the Oscars, also somehow rattle around nearly always at the back of my mind: “No… no… oh my God… no! Somebody, please help me!” Furthermore, unsurprisingly, the sense of hearing is often the last to remain functional in the final hours of life, even when a patient is unresponsive. The brain, apparently, continues to process sound, allowing loved ones to offer comfort through speech or music in a patient's final moments....