Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic's Search for Health and Healing

One of the least exalted physical conditions imaginable prompts a profound journey of self-discovery in this astringent medical memoir. In middle age, novelist Parks (Destiny) came down with excruciating chronic pelvic cramps and urinary difficulties that forced him to relieve himself six times a night. Instead of the prostate surgery his doctors recommended, he embarked on a self-help regimen of breathing exercises and Buddhist meditation, which, despite his contempt for all religious dogmas%E2%80%94especially the New Age variety%E2%80%94mysteriously eased his ailments. Even more startling was the psychological effect, as he started to question his ambition and busyness, his writing vocation, and the whole language-driven divide between mind and body. Like a latter-day Montaigne, Parks writes in an expansive, essayistic style that uses the pangs and humiliations of physical reality as a starting point for excursions into philosophy and literary criticism; his prose is mordantly funny, self-conscious but never self-pitying, worldly but introspective, attuned to the needs of a soul that he considers thoroughly material and mortal. The result is an absorbing, at times inspiring, narrative of spiritual growth. Photos. (June)