We probably used this text because the author has control over the course.

The book reads very much like a literature review in a doctoral thesis. If it ever comes out in a second edition, the author should find a decent editor to rewrite it. The style is murky and tedious. The illustrations are crude.

All the key points in this book are covered with greater clarity in any of the standard psychology of learning textbooks along with lists of the key research articles.

If you need to do a literature review in this field, the book could save you a lot of time.
Rating: 2 / 5

Test after medical test showed me to be quite healthy, with no discernable problems. When doctors suggested “stress,” I dismissed it as a junk diagnosis, thinking “why don’t you just say you don’t know instead of blaming stress for everything.” Turns out, though, that they were right.

Stress is much, much worse for us than previously imagined. It does not just affect us primarily mentally or with the occassional headache or indigestion…it can profoundly alter our body to the point of near disability. I know — because it has happened to me.

This book came as a godsend in helping me understand what was happening to my body, and why. It was the book that opened my eyes to the connection between stress and the adrenal glands, and the profound affect that prolonged exposure to stress can have on our hormonal system. Many physicians poo-poo the idea that the adrenals can eventually become exhausted because they reason that adrenaline goes up (not down) when the body is under stress. Hart shows that while such reasoning is correct, it is only half correct. Eventually, the body can no longer sustain the continual demand for over-production of adrenaline and the body will crash. When that happens, the physical results are profoundly severe.

Although Hart spends less time in the book dealing with the most serious stage of stress exhaustion – adrenal depletion – he was the first author that alerted me to this very real condition, and hence helped me on my journey to finding out what was wrong and how to get much-needed help for recovery from a debilitating condition.

Most have been conditioned to believe that stress will only manifest itself as eventual coronary problems. While this is true for some people – the heart attack out of the blue – there are a host of other physical symptoms that while perhaps not life-threatening, can render a person’s quality of life completely destroyed. There is a significant body of evidence, for example, to show that chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia are simply the body’s response to prolonged, chronic, unresolved stress.

I believe that anyone who deals with stress – from mild to severe – will benefit from this book. Knowing the dangers and warning signals of too much stress are vitally important in today’s ultra-demanding pace of life.

My only critique is that I wished he would have discussed the concept of adrenal fatigue or adrenal exhaustion in more detail. However, that topic is adequately addressed in other books – particularly “Chronic Fatigue Unmasked” by Gerald Poesnecker.
Rating: 4 / 5

Students of Kierkegaard will tell you the meaning of this book in terms of his personal life; philosophers will show you its philosophical meaning; the religious will describe it as a treatise on faith. It is probably all of these, and may be even more. The work centers on the exemplary life of Abraham, in particular the story in which he is asked by God to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac – the son given to him as fulfillment of a promise by God himself. This story is fully worthy of the “fear and trembling” the title expects, but it also serves as an archetypal example of faith itself, in uncompromising terms.

It is also a counter-argument against the (in Kierkegaard’s view) stifling moral rationalism of Hegel – an argument “on the strength of the absurd” which is nonetheless compelling, even if one were to ultimately reject it. Considering this, it is perhaps fitting that his work – certainly grave and severe – ultimately provides an affirmation of individual self-determination and a wholehearted engagement with the real world and its affairs… a faith which Kierkegaard professed himself incapable of.

Worth the time of reading once or several times. Poetic, but not lighthearted entertainment – then again, who would read a book titled “Fear and Trembling” on a lark?
Rating: 5 / 5

Perhaps the best metaphor can be found in the New Testament passage where Christ invites Peter to walk on water — Peter takes a step with faith and does not sink, but then looks down, and begins to evaluate the situation using his rational mind, and begins to sink. True faith walks on water. Only true faith could be sufficient to base a life on the conviction that a dead guy in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago came back from the dead and has his own kingdom where his followers will live forever in eternal bliss. On the other hand, this conviction has become so entrenched in the popular culture of the last 2,000 years that it has just become an unremarkable backdrop to the modern world and is considered a socially acceptable belief.

The challenge for a modern christian is to find true faith when they mistakenly believe that the story of Jesus Christ is completely supported by logic and rational thinking. The mere act of mentally assenting to what has been accepted in popular culture, a broad and shallow idea that God and Jesus exist, is not faith at all; just an unexamined conclusion of a lazy mind that has not yet questioned its own surroundings. True faith is a radical departure from the status quo, a renewal of personal conviction despite all contradictions and a recognition of UNCERTAINTY. Without a recognition of uncertainty, faith has no meaning. The strength of true faith is that it acknowledges that uncertainty exists, and yet still forges on in spite of the uncertainty, willingly accepting and embracing the consequences of conviction in the face of uncertainty. There is not fear that the conviction may be misled and flinching because of the uncertainty, there is a recognition that this lack of absolute rational proof and certainty is what gives faith its supreme virtue. This is what makes faith courageous and is something that only mortal humans can do, since angels are blessed with absolute knowledge whereas humans are blessed with uncertainty, which is the only way that true freedom can exist. Without this freedom, the choice of “faith” would not be possible, would not be courageous, and would not make mortals eligible for the reward of heaven.

The believer who claims that all faith is logical has not yet come to the moment of testing, like Abraham, like Kierkegaard, where the object of the soul’s deepest longing and only happiness is seen, but yet out of reach. For Kierkegaard it was the girl he loved, that he could never be with, but yet he retained hope and transformed that hope into a lifetime of faith. The personal pain of such an experience leads a person to exclaim “it doesn’t make sense!” Only when one reaches the point where it just doesn’t make sense can the ultimate nature of real and profound faith be experienced and put into action. Anything else is a shallow beginning, and not yet a sufficient faith to walk on water, just as Peter found when he was invited to take that step…

This book is full of such profound insight because Kierkegaard understood this and knew that faith was not a shallow, cheap or easy achievement:

“In those old days it was different. For then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, not a skill thought to be acquired in either days or weeks. When the old campaigner approached the end, had fought the good fight, and kept his faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten the fear and trembling that disciplined his youth….” (p.42)

Rating: 5 / 5