Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Bayport Public Library | 617.48092 DOT | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Oakdale Library | 617.48092 DOT | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 617.48092 DOT | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Wildwood Library (Mahtomedi) | 617.48092 DOT | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The award-winning New York Times bestseller about the extraordinary things that can happen when we harness the power of both the brain and the heart
Growing up in the high desert of California, Jim Doty was poor, with an alcoholic father and a mother chronically depressed and paralyzed by a stroke. Today he is the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University, of which the Dalai Lama is a founding benefactor. But back then his life was at a dead end until at twelve he wandered into a magic shop looking for a plastic thumb. Instead he met Ruth, a woman who taught him a series of exercises to ease his own suffering and manifest his greatest desires. Her final mandate was that he keep his heart open and teach these techniques to others. She gave him his first glimpse of the unique relationship between the brain and the heart.
Doty would go on to put Ruth's practices to work with extraordinary results--power and wealth that he could only imagine as a twelve-year-old, riding his orange Sting-Ray bike. But he neglects Ruth's most important lesson, to keep his heart open, with disastrous results--until he has the opportunity to make a spectacular charitable contribution that will virtually ruin him. Part memoir, part science, part inspiration, and part practical instruction, Into the Magic Shop shows us how we can fundamentally change our lives by first changing our brains and our hearts.
Author Notes
James R. Doty, M.D., is a professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University and the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), where he researches the neuroscience of compassion and altruism. He is also a philanthropist funding health clinics throughout the world and has endowed scholarships and chairs at multiple universities. He serves on the board of a number of nonprofits, including the Charter for Compassion International and the Dalai Lama Foundation.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Neurosurgeon Doty combines gut-wrenching memoir with meditative how-to in this well-told, grueling tale of his personal journey from frightened pre-teen with an alcoholic father and depressed mother to a respected doctor and philanthropist. He attributes his success to the ancient mindfulness and visualization techniques that "rewired" his brain and were taught to him in the back of a magic shop in 1968, when he was 12 years old. "When our brain changes, we change," Doty writes. "That is a truth proven by science. But an even greater truth is that when our heart changes, everything changes." It's the heart lesson that proves the hardest to learn for Doty as he boldly masters medical school to become a noted neurosurgeon and investment multimillionaire. Meditation and visualization are great for "journeying inward... but without wisdom and insight (opening the heart) the techniques can result in self-absorption, narcissism, and isolation." The inward voyage, he argues, is meant to lead a person to "go outward and connect with others." Doty's advice in this rags-to-riches tale is inspirational and the mindfulness techniques he advocates are clearly documented. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The opening pages of this memoir are not for the squeamish. Doty, a neurosurgery professor at Stanford University and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, describes in meticulous detail what happens during brain surgery, and, in particular, the sounds (like a large piece of Velcro tearing away from its source) and smells (summer sawdust) associated with it. He recalls his training to shut down all bodily responses when in the operating room. It's a form of hypervigilance, he writes, . . . almost like meditation. We train the mind, and the mind trains the body. Doty first learned to master this thinking when, at age 12, he visited a magic shop located in a nondescript strip mall in his hometown of Lancaster, California. This unusual memoir combines elements of self-help techniques magicians believe in their own magic, in the stories they are telling with anecdotes about Doty's own dysfunctional upbringing as the son of an abusive, alcoholic father. Using mindfulness and visualization helped him became a better surgeon, and he contends these techniques can assist anyone, in any walk of life.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2016 Booklist
Kirkus Review
A Stanford neurosurgeon and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education relates how to achieve lofty life goals by harnessing the power of both the brain and the heart. When Doty was an adolescent, he had a chance encounter at a magic shop with a benevolent older woman named Ruth, who over the next few weeks instructed him on a series of empowering mind-body exercises that would dramatically alter the direction of his life. Having grown up in impoverished circumstances in Lancaster, California, with an alcoholic father and depressed, suicidal mother, he would go on to achieve phenomenal success and wealth as a surgeon and entrepreneur. However, two episodes threatened to disrupt his future: a near-death experience from a car crash while still in medical residency and, later, a misguided business decision that led him to the brink of bankruptcy. By recalling Ruth's guided exercisesmost crucially, her instruction of first opening his heartDoty was able to regain momentum in his career and eventually realize a more richly profound destiny. In this well-meaning hybrid of inspirational self-help book and memoir, the author applies scientific investigation to the example of his life story, proving that you can overcome adversity and achieve meaningful success and enlightenment by embracing compassion along with focused willpower. "When our brains and our hearts are working in collaborationwe are happier, we are healthier, and we automatically express love, kindness, and care for one another," he writes. "I knew this intuitively, but I needed to validate it scientifically. This was the motivation to begin researching compassion and altruism. I wanted to understand the evolution of not only why we evolved such behavior but also how it affects the brain and ultimately our health." An optimistic and engagingly well-told life story that incorporates scientific investigation into its altruistic message. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The day I noticed my thumb was missing began like any other day the summer before I started eighth grade. I spent my days riding my bicycle around town, even though sometimes it was so hot the metal on my handlebars felt like a stove top. I could always taste the dust in my mouth--gritty and weedy like the rabbit brush and cacti that battled the desert sun and heat to survive. My family had little money, and I was often hungry. I didn't like being hungry. I didn't like being poor. Lancaster's greatest claim to fame was Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier at nearby Edwards Air Force Base some twenty years earlier. All day long planes would fly overhead, training pilots and testing aircraft. I wondered what it would be like to be Chuck Yeager flying the Bell X-1 at Mach 1, accomplishing what no human had ever done before. How small and desolate Lancaster must have looked to him from forty five thousand feet up going faster than anyone ever thought possible. It seemed small and desolate to me, and my feet were only a foot above the ground as I pedaled around on my bike. I had noticed my thumb missing that morning. I kept a wooden box under my bed that had all my most prized possessions. A small notebook that held my doodles, some secret poetry, and random crazy facts I had learned--like twenty banks are robbed every day in the world, snails can sleep for three years, and it's illegal to give a monkey a cigarette in Indiana. The box also held a worn copy of Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People , dog-eared on the pages that listed the six ways to get people to like you. I could recite the six things from memory. 1. Become genuinely interested in other people. 2. Smile. 3. Remember that a person's name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language. 4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. 5. Talk in terms of the other person's interest. 6. Make the other person feel important--and do it sincerely. I tried to do all of these things when I talked to anyone, but I always smiled with my mouth closed because when I was younger I had fallen and hit my upper lip on our coffee table, knocking out my front baby tooth. Because of that fall my front tooth grew in crooked and was discolored a dark brown. My parents didn't have the money to get it fixed. I was embarrassed to smile and show my discolored crooked tooth, so I tried to keep my mouth closed at all times. Besides the book, my wooden box also had all my magic tricks--a pack of marked cards, some gimmicked coins that I could change from nickels into dimes, and my most prized possession: a plastic thumb tip that could hide a silk scarf or a cigarette. That book and my magic tricks were very important to me--gifts from my father. I had spent hours and hours practicing with that thumb tip. Learning how to hold my hands so it wouldn't be obvious and how to smoothly stuff the scarf or a cigarette inside it so that it would appear to magically disappear. I was able to fool my friends and our neighbors in the apartment complex. But today the thumb was missing. Gone. Vanished. And I wasn't too happy about it. My brother, as usual, wasn't home, but I figured maybe he had taken it or at least might know where it was. I didn't know where he went every day, but I decided to get on my bike and go looking for him. That thumb tip was my most prized possession. Without it I was nothing. I needed my thumb back. Excerpted from Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart by James Doty All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Introduction: Beautiful Things | p. 1 |
| Part 1 Into the Magic Shop | |
| 1 Real Magic | p. 13 |
| 2 A Body at Rest | p. 25 |
| 3 Thinking About Thinking | p. 57 |
| 4 Growing Pains | p. 81 |
| 5 Three Wishes | p. 107 |
| Part 2 The Mysteries of the Brain | |
| 6 Apply Yourself | p. 133 |
| 7 Unacceptable | p. 153 |
| 8 It's Not Brain Surgery | p. 177 |
| 9 The Sultan of Nothing | p. 205 |
| Part 3 The Secrets of the Heart | |
| 10 Giving Up | p. 221 |
| 11 The Alphabet of the Heart | p. 235 |
| 12 Manifesting Compassion | p. 251 |
| 13 The Face of God | p. 267 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 275 |
