Healing Lazarus: A Buddhist's Journey from Near Death to New Life Hardcover – March 26, 2002

Richmond had it all: loving wife, great address in the San Francisco Bay area and a successful multifaceted career as software designer, Buddhist teacher, musician and author. He'd even beaten cancer once. Then viral encephalitis a rare disease attacked his brain and sent him into a coma for 10 days. While recovering, he experienced an acute neuropsychiatric complication from a therapeutic drug that posed a second life-threatening challenge. This page-turning account of his slow and spotty recovery is a vivid, affecting and painfully honest Buddhist dharma (teaching) story. This overachieving California-style corporate executive and former Buddhist priest whose previous book was Work as a Spiritual Practice: A Practical Buddhist Approach to Inner Growth and Satisfaction on the Job here learns that the central Buddhist teaching of life as suffering and impermanence has literal as well as spiritual meaning. Providing additional depth to his archetypal story of near-death and recovery, the author portrays the deeply rooted fears and anxieties that became his companions on the healing journey. The book may make a more valuable contribution to the literature about brain injury than to the well-stocked shelf of Buddhist titles; little non-technical or narrative writing is available on the medical frontier of brain trauma and the light it sheds on the relationship between body and mind. Richmond made a descent to the inner underworld, and returned a sadder, wiser man. His psychic excavations will enrich all who read this gripping account. (Apr. 2)Forecast: Richmond will be touring New York, Seattle, Portland and San Francisco to promote this title, which should cross over easily between the markets for Buddhist, New Age and illness books. The initial print run is 30,000 copies.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

A Buddhist teacher, software entrepreneur, and author of the best-selling Work as a Spiritual Practice, Richmond here writes about his near-fatal bout with viral encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) and subsequent lengthy recuperation. Inspired by the biblical character Lazarus, who died and was brought back to life, the book is divided into chapters dedicated to aspects of the healing process (e.g., fear and gratitude). Richmond is most compelling when detailing his struggles with the mental and emotional effects of the disease, such as distorted perception, hypersensitivity, and confusion. His story's strength lies in the depiction of the arduousness and pain of recovery; the Buddhist elements of the book feel like an overlay and are not explored in depth. Richmond seems to have been especially fortunate in his medical care because he does not include a single unpleasant encounter with a medical institution or caregiver something often depicted in other healing memoirs. For public libraries. Stephen Joseph, Butler Cty. Community Coll., PA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.