Staring at the Sun

Irvin D. Yalom

Written in Irvin Yalom’s inimitable story-telling style, Staring at the Sun is a profoundly encouraging approach to the universal issue of mortality.

In this magisterial opus, capping a lifetime of work and personal experience, Dr Yalom helps us recognise that the fear of death is at the heart of much of our day-to-day anxiety. This reality is often brought to the surface by an ‘awakening experience’ — a dream, a loss (such as the death of a loved one, a divorce, or the loss of a job or home), illness, trauma, or ageing.

Once we confront our own mortality, Dr Yalom writes, we are inspired to rearrange our priorities, communicate more deeply with those we love, appreciate more keenly the beauty of life, and increase our willingness to take the risks necessary for personal fulfillment.

This is a book with tremendous utility, including the provision of techniques for dealing with the most prevalent kinds of fears of death — especially by living in the here and now, and by embracing what Dr Yalom calls ‘rippling’, the influence and impact we all have that has a life beyond our own.

Irvin D. Yalom

Author photo

Irvin D. Yalom is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine. The author of the definitive textbook The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, which has sold 700,000 copies in eighteen languages and is now in its fifth edition, he also wrote Existential Psychotherapy, a textbook for a course that did not exist at the time. Dr Yalom has written several trade books for the general reader, including a collection of therapy tales, Love's Executioner, which was a New York Times best seller; the novels When Nietzsche Wept, also a best seller in the United States, Israel, Greece, Turkey, Argentina, Brazil, and Germany (where it sold more than a million copies); Momma and the Meaning of Life, a collection of true and fictionalised tales of therapy; The Gift of Therapy; and The Schopenhauer Cure. Dr Yalom has an active but part-time private practice in Palo Alto and San Francisco, California.

Website: http://www.yalom.com/