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|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | 152.46 HOL | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Frozen in terror during a mountain descent, award-winning journalist Eva Holland reaches her breaking point. Since childhood, she's been gripped by two debilitating phobias: fear of losing her mother, and fear of heights. The worst has already happened: Eva's mother died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2015. But now--after an arduous, embarrassing, and tearful finale to her ice-climbing expedition--Eva decides, enough. Fear may define her past, but she won't let it dictate her future.
Thus begins Holland's quest to renegotiate her inhibiting relationship with fear. In stirring, raw prose, she reveals what it's like to live in the clutches of paralyzing dread. And with remarkable courage, she tests the limits of what one can do to live less fearfully--from engaging in daring adventure to cutting-edge research: She confronts her acrophobia by jumping out of an airplane, explores the lives of rare individuals who feel little or no fear, and meets with scientists working to eliminate phobias with a single pill.
Of course, one doesn't have to go out of the way to face fear; by horrible coincidence, a series of freak accidents leaves Holland deeply shaken. Determined to stay the course, she seeks out a surprisingly effective treatment involving eye movement--to reckon with lingering trauma and anxiety to rid herself of intrusive memories and panics while driving.
Ultimately, Holland's odyssey sheds light on universal questions: How do we feel fear, and why? Is fear necessary? Is it rooted in the body or the mind? And it brings her ever closer to knowing: Is there a better way to feel afraid? Finding the nerve to face down her fears, Holland not only shows us how to grapple with our own, but invites us to embrace them as a way to live happier and feel more alive.
Author Notes
Eva Holland is a correspondent for Outside magazine, and a former editor at Up Here, the magazine of Canada's far north. Her work has also appeared in Esquire, Wired, Bloomberg, Pacific Standard, AFAR, Smithsonian, Grantland, Seattle Met, National Geographic News, and many other outlets. Her work has been nominated for a Canadian National Magazine Award, anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best Women's Travel Writing, and Best Canadian Sports Writing, and listed among the notable selections in multiple editions of The Best American Essays, The Best American Sports Writing, and The Best American Travel Writing. She lives in Canada's Yukon Territory.
Reviews (3)
Kirkus Review
Her mother's unexpected death inspires a Yukon Territory-based adventurer and travel journalist to face her fears.In a harmonious blend of memoir and science reporting, Outside correspondent Holland describes her attempts to "learn to master my fear," embarking on a three-year project of research and treatment following the devastating death of her mother. Her mother had been an orphan, shaken by the death of her own mother, which left the author anticipating her mother's death more fearfully than anything else. When Holland's fears were realized, she fell apart, unable to work or deal with people and falling into free-floating anxiety and the occasional panic attack. Other fears came to the fore of her consciousnesse.g., a fear of heights from a childhood escalator mishap (though she later learned that her father had suffered from something similar and that such fears might be genetic in origin) and lingering PTSD from a series of car crashes. The book is most compelling at its most personal, as the author makes her story seem both specific and universal: "An irony: fear is an experience that unites us, even as, in the moment, it makes us feel very much alone." Holland faced her challenges through both exposure therapy and pharmaceutical applications, and she traces the theories of fear and how to treat it, including Freudian therapy, lobotomy, electroshock treatment, and other more modern approaches. Throughout the narrative, the author develops herself as a protagonist whose fears are serious enough to benefit from treatment but whose condition should strike a responsive chord in many readers. Her goal is not to eliminate fear, which serves as a tool for self-preservation, but to put it into perspective. By the end, she writes, "I am much less afraid of fear itself." Science and psychology inform the engaging memoir of an author on a self-help mission. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In this readable overview of what happens when human beings lose their nerve, author Holland employs relatable life experiences to explore multiple facets of fear. Some might think that the author, a Yukon-dwelling journalist who writes about travel and intense outdoor activities, wouldn't be someone who scares easily. However, after experiencing a meltdown during a recreational ice climb, Holland became fascinated with what causes fear, and what makes fear go away. Using her personal trauma triggers--her mother's death, multiple car wrecks, and heights--Holland explores types of fear (phobias, horror, anxiety, dread); psychological, neurological, and biological responses; evolving medical treatments (black bile purges, exorcisms, lobotomies, electroshock therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, habituation therapy, drugs), and opinions from an array of contributors (Hippocrates, Freud, Frank "Fear is the mind killer" Herbert, Professor Remus Lupin). Readers share in the journey as Holland confronts her fears and comes to successfully manage them. Detailed chapter notes and a selected bibliography round things out. This might encourage readers to identify, examine, and tackle fears of their own.
Library Journal Review
Fear is essential for human survival, acknowledges Outdoor correspondent Holland, but when her anxieties began seriously to inhibit her life, the author decided to conduct an in-depth exploration of the science of fear in an attempt to conquer her own. Here Holland examines phobias, trauma, and existential fears. Each category is meaningful for Holland, as she has a fear of heights, fear of driving after a series of car accidents, and a life-long fear of losing her mother (which sadly came to pass). Holland walks readers through the science behind this emotion, specifically what happens in the brain during an terrifying experience. She also deciphers much of the research aimed at helping people overcome their feelings of dread. Using herself as a guinea pig, Holland explored various treatment paths, including exposure therapy and other clinical and pharmaceutical approaches. VERDICT Combining anecdotes that document her personal vulnerabilities with tales of outdoor adventure and just enough scientific research, Holland crafts an engaging and unique memoir. Fans of the self-help genre and popular science in the style of Mary Roach will enjoy this debut title.--Ragan O'Malley, Saint Ann's Sch., Brooklyn
Table of Contents
| Prologue | p. ix |
| Part 1 | |
| 1 A personal history of fear | p. 3 |
| 2 This is your brain on fear | p. 23 |
| 3 A fear fulfilled | p. 49 |
| Part 2 | |
| 4 Free fall | p. 60 |
| 5 On the wall | p. 77 |
| 6 Wrecked | p. 105 |
| Part 3 | |
| 7 The fear cure | p. 149 |
| 8 Fearless | p. 172 |
| 9 Why fear matters | p. 195 |
| Epilogue: a detente with fear | p. 214 |
| Selected bibliography | p. 226 |
| Notes on sources | p. 229 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 235 |
| About the author | p. 238 |
