Energy Healing Experiments or Great Wall

Energy Healing Experiments: Science Reveals Our Natural Power to Heal

Author: Gary E Schwartz

A healer removes the pain of a broken wrist in fifteen minutes. Another removesan ovarian tumor in a couple of weeks. Still another, from thousands of miles away, regenerates the nerves of an injured spine for a patient on whom the doctors had given up. These sound like tabloid stories but could they be true? They are just three out of millions of instances in which healers have claimed to manipulate energy fields to cure the body.

Books on vibrational medicine, prayer, and spiritual healing present readers with an array of historical and current discoveries and techniques. But so far nobody has addressed the reality of healing through comprehensive scientificresearch. The Energy Healing Experiments fills that void. Harvard-educated Dr. Gary E. Schwartz provides scientific experiments and evidence to reveal the truth about the existence of energy fields and unlocks their potential for enhancing your health.

Publishers Weekly

Are energy fields real? And if so, can they be used for healing and health? Yes, according to Schwartz (The G.O.D. Experiments), a professor of psychology, surgery, medicine, neurology and psychiatry at the University of Arizona. He tells marvelous stories of such healings and uses experiments to confirm that the human body is a bundle of energy that can be healed by another such bundle of energy. One story is of a four-year-old boy, Philip, whose heart rate dropped precipitously following surgery; a Hindu avatar, by merely touching Philip, increased his heart rate to 80 beats a minute. Through experiments with EEGs and EKGs, Schwartz says, he and others have found that our bodies are masses of biochemical energy, that such energy connects us to plants and other animals, that this energy can be harnessed for healing and that some people are in touch with their energy and use it to heal others. Schwartz's research has not appeared in peer-reviewed journals (due to their bias against such work, he says), so skeptics will want to wait for his experiments to be replicated. But those disposed to believe in the healing touch will find support for that belief. (Aug.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Elizabeth Williams - Library Journal

The notion of healing someone with the laying on of hands has to it both a religious feel and a Star Trekone. Schwartz (psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry, & surgery, Univ. of Arizona) wants to move it into the arena of hard science. After a foreword by former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona (who, like Schwartz, is affiliated with Tucson's Canyon Ranch Spa), Schwartz discusses various types of energy healing, e.g., Reiki and shamanism, and explains his experiments in determining how people detect and correct others' energy fields. He writes in an easygoing, enthusiastic style that makes it clear he believes in energy healing and would like to convince readers it is an emerging area of complementary medicine. Although skeptics in the medical field are likely to find his arguments unpersuasive, Schwartz's earlier books-The Truth About Mediumand The G.O.D. Experiments, also coauthored by Simon-did get some press, so expect demand from the crystal crowd. Recommended for public libraries with patrons interested in alternative therapies and psychic healing as well as for academic/medical libraries with very open-minded clientele.

See also: Inventing a Nation or Christopher Hitchens and His Critics

Great Wall: China Against the World 1000 BC - 2000 AD

Author: Julia Lovell

Legendarily 2,200 years old and 4,300 miles long, the Great Wall of China seems to make an overwhelmingly confident physical statement about the country it spans: about China's age-old sense of itself being an advanced civilization anxious to draw a clear line between itself and the "barbarians" at its borders. But behind the wall's intimidating exterior--and the myths that have built up around it--is a complex history that has both defined and undermined China. Author Julia Lovell has written a new and important history of the Great Wall that guides the reader through the conquests and cataclysms of the Chinese empire, from the second millennium BC to the present day.

In recent years, the Wall has become an ever more potent symbol of Chinese nationalism, of a determination to resist foreign domination. But how successful was the Wall in reality, and what was its real purpose? Was it a precursor, albeit on a huge scale, of the Berlin Wall--a barrier designed to keep its population in as much as undesirables out? Lovell looks behind the modern mythology of the Great Wall, uncovering a three-thousand-year history far more fragmented and less illustrious than its crowds of visitors imagine today. The story of the Wall winds through that of the Chinese state and the frontier policy that defined it, through the lives of the millions of individuals who supported, criticized, built, and attacked it.

Publishers Weekly

There is no Great Wall of China, argues Lovell, who teaches Chinese history at Cambridge University. Instead, there are many Great Walls-physical, mental, cultural, military and economic-separating China from the outside world. The 4,300-mile-long wall is far more complex than any of the thousands of tourists taking a photo along its famous battlements realizes. Indeed, to the Chinese themselves, their wall has variously signified repression, freedom, security, vulnerability, cultural superiority, economic backwardness, imperial greatness and national humiliation. Still, myths about it abound. Far from it being unbreachable, Chinese emperors relied on the wall only as a last resort to fend off their enemies. (The Ming dynasty, for instance, found it useless against the victorious Manchus, who merely bribed the gatekeepers to let them in.) "As a strategy that has survived for more than two millennia," Lovell writes, "China's frontier wall is a monumental metaphor for reading China and its history, for defining a culture and a worldview...." Lovell tells the gripping, colorful story of the wall up to the present day, including a perceptive discussion of the "Great Firewall"-the Internet, which has replaced nomadic raiders as the most threatening of China's attackers. And no, you cannot see it from the Moon. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

KLIATT

Nominated for the 2006 Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction, Lovell's book is a remarkable accomplishment. Filling an increasing need for those outside this growing power's borders to understand China's history, Lovell provides some thoughtful, provocative evidence and conclusions. She sweeps through 4000 years of history with confidence and skill, tying it all together through the symbolism of The Great Wall. She finds through all those different eras and dynasties some remarkable consistent themes: a less united national state than most of us might have imagined, periods of alternating political and economic stagnation and renewal, ambivalence about being open or closed to the outside world, and persistent myth-making by dangerously isolated, xenophobic leaders. The book has some useful additions: indices of dates and names and dynasties, useful maps, some excellent picture sections, bibliography, notes and a solid index. In the coming years, we are likely to see commentators and historians around the world present quite contradictory evaluations and predictions about China's future: some urging us to follow China's lead (remember the 1980's craze for Japanese-style educational and business models?), some urging us to make her our new best friend, some seeing her as our most dangerous political and economic competitor who we have to prepare to combat. Our chances of seeing China clearly depend on more books like this.

Foreign Affairs

One might have thought that there was little need for another book on the Great Wall, especially after Arthur Waldron's masterly study, but Lovell demonstrates that the subject is far from exhausted. She brings together facts and figures to show what an awesome engineering feat the construction of the wall was. It included enough bricks to build a wall five meters high and one meter thick to encircle the globe; the sections that still stand would be sufficient to link New York and Los Angeles. Yet Lovell's interests lie more in how the wall shaped Chinese political and strategic thinking. The wall served contradictory purposes for China's rulers: it was there to keep the barbarians out but also to awe outsiders, to protect the Chinese people from outside forces but also to prevent exposure to the outside world.

Library Journal

For a long time in both China and the outside world, the Great Wall was the symbol of isolation, self-sufficiency, and arrogant tradition. But now that China has opened itself to the world (or "re-opened" itself, as it were), that stereotype no longer fits. A new understanding of China is needed, and historians have flocked to rethink historic foreign relations. With wide experience in contemporary China, Lovell (Chinese history & literature, Cambridge; trans., A Dictionary of Maqiao) tells the story of the wall as she shows how China was shaped over the course of 2000 years by interactions with Central Asia and the peoples of the steppe (she calls them barbarians, a term smacking of those old stereotypes). The opening chapter on the 18th- and 19th-century encounters with Britain does not reflect recent scholarly debates, but the terrific concluding chapter, "Great Wall, the Great Mall, and the Great Firewall," contains insightful personal observations on China's relations with the world today. Larger public libraries would do well to acquire this lively survey for curious readers with some knowledge of China.-Charles W. Hayford, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	Introduction : who made the Great Wall of China?	1
1	Why walls?	25
2	The long wall	47
3	Han Walls : plus ca change	66
4	Shifting frontiers and decadent barbarians	93
5	China reunited	117
6	Without walls : the Chinese frontiers expand	137
7	The return of the barbarians	159
8	A case of open and shut : the early Ming frontier	181
9	The wall goes up	210
10	The great fall of China	232
11	How Barbarians made the Great Wall	262
12	Translating the Great Wall into Chinese	296
	Conclusion : the Great Wall, the great mall and the great firewall	323
App. 1	Principal characters	351
App. 2	Chronology of dynasties	359
App. 3	Significant dates in Chinese history and wall-building	361