Endorsements for Creatures of a Day
Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone
"Poignant and beautiful insights from a wise therapist looking back on a career, a therapist who happens to be a writer I greatly admire—Creatures of a Day is just what the Doctor ordered."
Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works and The Sense of Style"
"In Love's Executioner Irv Yalom invented a new literary genre: narratives of psychotherapy with the pathos of great fiction and the insight of great essays. For those of us who learned so much from Yalom, the publication of Creatures of a Day is a reason to celebrate."
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, McArthur Fellow and author of Plato at the Googleplex and Betraying Spinoza
"Irvin Yalom has produced a book of such piercing depth that to enter into it is transformative. You feel less like you are reading Creatures of a Day than that it is reading you. Only a handful of books can accomplish such a feat. Give praise that one more has entered this rare and precious list."
Jay Parini, author of The Last Station
"I've been a deep admirer of Irvin D. Yalom's writing—in fiction and nonfiction—for many years. In Creatures of a Day, he brings together his profound sense of human suffering and joy with a novelist's eye for detail, for narrative moment. A moving and original work."
Daniel Menaker, author of The Treatment and My Mistake: A Memoir
"These individual accounts of emotional challenges and resolutions shine a brilliant light on what it means to be human and to need help. Together they disprove the book's title in a glorious way: they are a permanent beacon of sanity and compassion and thus transcend the very fact of mortality that they often concern."
George Vaillant, Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard University, and author of Triumphs of Experience and Aging Well
"Dr. Yalom has written a magical book. The result will be that of meeting, up close, a truly wise man, a really kind man, and of feeling deeply understood."
Kathleen Gerard, Shelf Awareness
“Creatures of a Day serves as something of a companion volume to Love’s Executioner, again offering 10 revealing and creatively crafted clinical case studies of real people.... Throughout, Yalom is wise and well-read, citing passages from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, Yeats and Greek mythology.... Through Yalom’s gentle wisdom, expertise and leading – coupled with dream recognition and patients taking him through the minutiae of a day in their lives – bonding and healing occurs.... [He] welcomes each new case and patient dilemma with an analytical mind, personal empathy and an innate curiosity that drives and shapes the two-person narrative dramas that fill this book."
Library Journal (Starred Review)
“Personal, honest, sensitive, and respectful, Yalom, now in his 80s, describes frustration and mistakes amid much success. His combination of confidence and humility shows how these qualities work in psychotherapy – a process too often burdened with theory and/or mystique.... This book will inspire therapists at any stage along with lay readers intrigued by the psyche, relationships, and the possibilities of change.”
Publisher's Weekly
“Novelist and psychiatrist Yalom offers 10 tales from his clients that illuminate the gifts of psychotherapy, particularly the hopeful lessons one can glean from it in the context of aging and death.... [He] has genuinely inspiring insights to share about the value of therapy.... The stories Yalom offers of his patients’ failures and triumphs are frequently moving and will invoke the reader’s empathy.”