After forty-three years in the sacred space of caring for patients, Dr. Donovan shares his observations and thoughts about illness and healing. He believes illness serves us by acting as life's transformative process. As such, the journey through our illness may be precisely the very experiential journey we need to realize our healing and ourselves more fully. After all, we don't "get" cancer. Cancer, like any illness, is a process. We "are" the cancer we manifest. Our cancer arises out of our own tissues and cellular make up. To rid our self of our cancer is to rid our self of a part of our self. Instead of thinking about illness as something we "get," something separate from ourselves needing to be removed or defeated, Dr. Donovan thinks we might well do better viewing our illness as a transformational journey that must be undertaken and completed for our healing to emerge. We can't get rid of our selves but we can transform ourselves and our illness provides us with that opportunity. It allows us our healing.

During his 1920s heyday, Arnold Bennett was one of Britain's most celebrated writers. As the author of The Old Wives' Tale and Clayhanger he was a household name, writing just as much for the common man as London's literati. His face was plastered over theatre hoardings and the sides of West End omnibuses. His life represents the ultimate rags-to-riches story of a man who 'banged on the door of Fortune like a weekly debt collector' as one of his obituaries so vividly put it. Yet for all his success, few were aware how cursed Bennett felt by his life-long stutter and other debilitating character traits. In the years running up to his death in 1931, his affairs were close to collapse as he fought a losing battle on three fronts: with his estranged wife; with his disenchanted mistress; and from a literary perspective with Virginia Woolf. As the first full length biography of Bennett since 1974, the work draws on a wealth of unpublished diaries and letters to shed new light on a personality who can be considered a 'Lost Icon' of early Twentieth Century Britain.

After forty-three years in the sacred space of caring for patients, Dr. Donovan shares his observations and thoughts about illness and healing. He believes illness serves us by acting as life's transformative process. As such, the journey through our illness may be precisely the very experiential journey we need to realize our healing and ourselves more fully. After all, we don't "get" cancer. Cancer, like any illness, is a process. We "are" the cancer we manifest. Our cancer arises out of our own tissues and cellular make up. To rid our self of our cancer is to rid our self of a part of our self. Instead of thinking about illness as something we "get," something separate from ourselves needing to be removed or defeated, Dr. Donovan thinks we might well do better viewing our illness as a transformational journey that must be undertaken and completed for our healing to emerge. We can't get rid of our selves but we can transform ourselves and our illness provides us with that opportunity. It allows us our healing.