I experienced some deja vu reading Change Your Brain, Change Your Body.While the emphasis within this book was maybe a little bit different from any I’ve read before it, it appears that there is not much groundbreaking information about taking care of your body. Like Anticancer before it any other number of healthy living books, this one doesn’t go a whole lot farther than the basics. And I don’t mean to say it like it’s a bad thing.

The emphasis in this book is on the  health of the brain. The author, Daniel Amen says, rightly I suppose, that having a healthy body is only so much use if you’re not also going to have a healthy brain. He wants you to “Use Your Brain to Get and Keep the Body You Have Always Wanted,” according to the book’s subtitle. I’ll say off the top that the book isn’t as bad as it may sound based on that title. The key to a healthy body, he says, one that is in shape, energized, and youthful, is a healthy brain. If you’ve got a healthy brain, you’re well on your way to having a healthy body.

Most of the advice he dispenses is of the common sense variety. Eat your vegetables, take vitamin supplements, maintain a balanced diet, don’t eat too much junk food. You know how it goes. In return you’ll be healthier, feel healthier, sleep better, enjoy sex more, and so on. It’s the very things your mother told you all those years ago (though she probably left out the bit about sex).

One thing I found interesting is that the author cannot avoid discussing the body-soul connection. He seems to have no consistent spiritual framework to work from and certainly no love for the Bible. Yet he cannot deny the importance of caring for the soul as well as the body. He suggests doing this through Eastern-style meditation or through whatever rites or rituals are important to you. The suggestions he gives are far less compelling to me than the fact that he has to make them in the first place. Even the unbeliever or the person who denies God cannot deny that somehow, somewhere we are more than bodies, more than just flesh and blood. But as usual, the prescription will do nothing to to cure the ill. The solution, he suggests through his worldview, is intrinsic–look inside of yourself and you fill find peace. But the Bible tells a very different story. When we look inside we see what ails us. It is only when we look outside of ourselves that we can find what the cure for the ultimate disease.

It is well and good to have a healthy brain and a healthy body. But how much better is it to have a healthy soul? A man may gain the whole world, he may gain the brightest brain and the most beautiful body, and still lose his soul.

Verdict: Read it if it’s been too long since you read a book on healthy living

Of all the books to make their way onto the bestseller list this year, Anticancer is the one I’ve wanted to read the least. That explains why it’s been hanging around my “list of things to do” for weeks now without any noticeable progress. But finally I caught up on all my reading and I could procrastinate no longer. And the book was just as bad as I had feared; or very nearly so at any rate.

Now let me explain. It’s not that the book is devoid of any good information. Servan-Schreiber is a former cancer patient who has twice survived brain tumors, so he writes about this subject from hard personal experience. He is a doctor and researcher so he deals with the subject from the medical perspective as well. He nicely blends the scientific with the biographical and this gives him credibility on two levels. Unfortunately, he has also read too many New Age books and has spent too much time doing yoga.

Anticancer succeeds where Servan-Schreiber attempts to describe the kind of lifestyle and diet that can prevent cancer, assist in beating the disease and help recover from it. Here he shares the latest wisdom on the foods and components of food that have been found to promote good health (the usual suspects: garlic, fish, omega-3, etc, etc) and those that have been found to hinder good health (processed and synthetic sugars, trans fats, and so on). He shares good and common sense about getting sufficient amounts of exercise and avoiding undue stress. All is well and good.

Where Anticancer fails is where he deals with all of this from the mental and spiritual angles. Here we find him speaking more from personal experience than from scientific fact. He has dabbled in eastern religions and has absorbed more from them through New Age practices. And so he promotes eastern-style meditation as a necessary component to a healthy lifestyle. He also writes about the importance of embracing one’s “true self” as a crucial component to holistic good health, going so far as to say that denying one’s natural homosexuality can inhibit the body’s immune system (which is a real head-scratcher if you consider that sexually-active homosexuals are hardly known for their strong immune systems).

So I suppose we have an interesting mix of good and bad. I appreciated Servan-Schreiber’s attempts to view health as more than just a sound body or a strong immune system. Certainly a well-rounded understanding of health has to go farther than just the physical. At the same time Servan-Schreiber appears to deny the Creator, the one who gave us both body and soul and who prescribes how we are to live holistically in both the physical and the spiritual. For a book of this nature to truly minister to the Christian in times of illness, it would need to minister at both levels. So while Anticancer’s teaching on the physical dimension may be sound and well worth reading, its teaching on the spiritual level is sorely lacking and, worse, patently unbiblical.

It would only be with some hesitation that I’d recommend this book. Admittedly I have not read much else in this category (and hope I never have to), but I assume there must be books out there that would offer similar wisdom on the body while leaving the spiritual angle for a true physician of the soul.

Verdict: Read it if you can find nothing better on the subject.

Tastes come and go, rise and wane. For today, at least, it seems that animal stories are all the rage. We probably have Marley and his amazing success to blame. So it is not surprising that, just a month into this project, I’ve come across the story of an animal. This time it is the story of Oscar, a cat with a strange gift.

Oscar lives in Steere House in Providence, Rhode Island. Steere House is a nursing home with a large ward for patients with dementia. Oscar is one of several animals who lives in the home, providing comfort and companionship to the residents. But Oscar is unique in that he seems to always be present when a patient is in the final hours of life. Author David Dosa, a geriatrician who works at the home, plays the role of the guy who is ambivalent toward animals, but ready to be convinced. Much of the book proceeds through a long series of interviews with family members of former patients, asking them about their experience with Oscar. Time and time again he hears that Oscar was there when a person passed away.

And that’s about it. Dosa writes in narrative fashion with lots of detailed conversations. Seeing as many of these conversations were utterly inconsequential and seeing as they happened several years ago, it’s quite clear that these bits of dialog are “could-be-true” more than hard fact. The dialog is often stilted, neither realistic nor high in literary quality. It is a flaw, though not a fatal one.

More interesting and more consequential than Dosa’s musings about a cat (I’m no fan of felines or most other pets, for that) are his descriptions of end-of-life care. Culturally, we have a lot of thinking to do about caring for those who are near-death, and especially so as our population ages. So often today we leave people almost indefinitely suspended between life and death, purposelessly staving off the inevitable. Dosa sees this struggle every day. Though he does little to suggest a better way forward, he does provide many useful case studies where we see the issues up close and personal.

Also useful are his descriptions of men and women suffering from dementia. As he describes such people he humanizes them, giving a face to what is often abstract. Many of the stories are heartbreaking (such as the man who entered his wife’s room to celebrate their anniversary, only to have her scream and slap him, having forgotten who he was; the man walked away and never returned). Having dealt with Alzheimer’s in my own family, I can attest to its devastating effects. The benefit I found in this book was in thinking about people like my grandfather who was, at the time of his death, just a shadow of the man he had been in life.

As for the cat, well, who knows? Dosa proposes that he may smell something that warns him of the onset of death. Maybe, perversely, he enjoys this scent and goes to curl up with the dying patients for his own satisfaction more than their comfort. Either way, Oscar is no more than a rather uninteresting character in an largely unremarkable book. I see little to recommend it.

Verdict: Read it if you really, really like cats (or geriatricians).