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Creatures of a Day

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What to expect

What makes life meaningful? How do we confront our inevitable end? An eminent psychiatrist draws on decades of clinical experience to show how he and his patients have grappled with the most profound existential questions. 

“A remedy more powerful than any fad or pill could promise.” ―Washington Post 

In this stunning collection of stories, renowned psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom describes his patients’ struggles—as well as his own—to come to terms with the two great challenges of existence: how to have a meaningful life yet reckon with its inevitable end. We meet a nurse who must stifle the pain of losing her son in order to comfort her patients’ pains, a newly minted psychologist whose studies damage her treasured memories of a lost friend, and a man whose rejection of psychological inquiry forces even Yalom himself into a crisis of confidence. 

Creatures of a Day is a radically honest statement about the difficulties of human life, but also a celebration of some of the finest fruits—love, family, friendship—it can offer. Marcus Aurelius has written that “we are all creatures of a day.” With Yalom as our guide, we will find the means to make our own day not only bearable, but also meaningful and joyful. 

Critics Review

“Stunning.”—Salon
“Creatures of a Day is just what the doctor ordered!”—Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone
“A remedy more powerful than any fad or pill could promise.”—Washington Post
“Poignant and bracing.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“These individual accounts of emotional challenges and resolutions―from a man ashamed of his hoarding to a woman with a terminal cancer diagnosis―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
“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
“Dr. Yalom has written a magical book. Anyone who has ever thought about his or her own aging or mortality will love this book. The result will be that of meeting , up close, a truly wise man, a really kind man, and of feeling deeply understood.”—George Valliant, professor of psychiatry, Harvard University, and author of Triumphs of Experience and Aging Well
“A quarter of a century ago, I wrote a review in the Tribune of Yalom’s first book for the general public, Love’s Executioner & Other Tales of Psychotherapy, a similar collection of case studies. What struck me then and what strikes me now with his latest book is Yalom’s willingness to expose his flaws and failures ... Just as Yalom’s description of the hard-working but flawed therapist rings true, so do his descriptions of his patients and their struggles, especially their struggles with the reality of death … Yalom sees the therapist as a poet. He sees therapy as an art. And he sees his clients as fellow poets, working the high wire, alone and with him. In their sessions, he and they are alive to the moment—or trying to be. And that’s what life is, isn’t it?”—Patrick T. Reardon, Chicago Tribune
“In a profession that exists exclusively behind closed doors, it’s rare and precious to get a real peek through the window to witness the raw power of the therapeutic process ... This book is the best of its kind I’ve read to date, offering a tender and credible look behind the curtain, through a powerful series of vignettes.”—Miranda Palmer, PsychCentral
“[Yalom] writes amiably, certainly sympathetically, and always wisely from his point of view as an octogenarian therapist who has seen it all―well, maybe almost all―and wo has some useful thoughts about the mysteries of the mind … [He] offers plenty of pointers for up-and-coming therapists and does so without staking out ideological territory in the ongoing battles among post-Freudians, past-Jungians, and post-everyone-elsians. A humane, highly knowledgeable glimpse of the therapist’s couch.”—Kirkus
“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.”—Library Journal, starred review
“Novelist and psychiatrist Yalom offers ten 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 ... Yalom has genuinely inspiring insights to share about the value of therapy … The stories [he] offers of his patients’ failures and triumphs are frequently moving and will invoke the reader’s empathy.”—Publishers Weekly
Author Irvin D. Yalom
Duration 7 hours
Release Date
ISBN 9781668664704
Format Audiobook
Publisher Hachette Audio
Genre Age groups: the elderly, Literary essays, Psychoanalytical and Freudian psychology
Availability US

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