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“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.”—Kathleen Gerard, Shelf Awareness "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."— Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone "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."— Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works and The Sense of Style "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."— Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, McArthur Fellow and author of Plato at the Googleplex and Betraying Spinoza "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."— Jay Parini, author of The Last Station "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."— Daniel Menaker, author of The Treatment and My Mistake: A Memoir "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."— George Vaillant, Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard University, and author of Triumphs of Experience and Aging Well |
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