The Relaxation Response or Desire

The Relaxation Response

Author: Herbert Benson

When Dr. Herbert Benson introduced this simple, effective, mind/body approach to relieve stress in The Relaxation Response twenty-five years ago, the book became an instant national bestseller. Since that time, millions of people have learned the secret of the relaxation response--without high-priced lectures, drugs, or prescription medicine. The tremendous success of this approach has turned The Relaxation Response into the classic reference recommended by most health care professionals and authorities to treat the harmful effects of stress.

This revitalizing, therapeutic approach, discovered by Dr. Benson and his colleagues in the laboratories of Harvard Medical School and its teaching hospitals, is now routinely recommended to treat patients suffering from heart conditions, high blood pressure, chronic pain, insomnia, and many other physical ailments. Requiring only minutes to learn, and just ten to twenty minutes of practice twice a day, the Relaxation Response has proven to be one of the most effective ways to relieve the tensions of modern-day living for a richer, healthier, more productive life.

Noah Gordan

The Relaxation Response can show us how to lower our blood pressure, change our harassed personalities, and, perhaps, even save our lives. —Journal of Human Stress

David W. Ewing

Pills, special diets, and exercises can help some people, but The Relaxation Response as Dr. Benson describes it can help everyone. —Harvard Business Review

Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction

Author: Susan Cheever

We've all felt the giddy flutter of excitement when our new lover walks into the room. Waited by the phone, changed our plans...But are we in love, or is there something darker at work? In Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction, Susan Cheever explores the shifting boundaries between the feelings of passion and addiction, desire and need, and she raises provocative and important questions about who we love and why.

Elegantly written and thoughtfully composed, Cheever's book combines unsparing and intimate memoir, interviews and stories, hard science and psychology to explore the difference between falling in love and falling prey to an addiction. Part one defines what addiction is and how it works—the obsession, the betrayals, the broken promises to oneself and others. Part two explores the possible causes of addiction—is it nature or nurture, a permanent condition or a temporary derangement? Part three considers what we can do about it, including a provocative suggestion about how we describe and treat addiction, and a look at the importance of community and storytelling.

In the end, there are no easy answers. "A straight look about some crooked feelings," Desire shows us the difference between the addiction that cripples our emotions, and healthy, empowering love that enhances our lives.

Publishers Weekly

"We are a nation of puritanical love junkies," proclaims Cheever (My Name Is Bill) in her inquiry into the growing scientific and psychological evidence that suggests a chemical basis for sex addiction. Drawing on a hodge-podge of addiction literature, neurobiological studies and her more informal (but most persuasive) role as a seasoned battler of her own obsessions, Cheever believes that American idealism taints our expectations of relationships: "In our world, addiction to other people... is the only addiction that is applauded and embraced.... " But for Cheever, a lover's destructive behavior can be just as traumatizing as that of an alcoholic, a bulimic or a compulsive gambler. Cheever is best when writing personally; her candid memories of emotionally abusive parents, repeated adultery and consuming love drive an otherwise meandering text. Her cultural subjects are titillating enough and range from the voyeurism of To Catch a Predator to speculation that Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, struggled to hide a sex addiction. But the reader strains to connect slim narrative threads of this unstructured meditation on obsession. (Oct.)

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Kirkus Reviews

Cheever (American Bloomsbury, 2006, etc.) explores the vagaries of addiction and desire. The author's offspring suggested that she dedicate her slight meditation on sexual addiction "to my children who died of embarrassment." In fact, the book is not so much a nitty-gritty tell-all as it is a series of free-form musings on what addiction is and why it affects people so powerfully. Cheever touches on her three marriages (to Robert Cowley, Calvin Tomkins and Warren Hinckle), her apparent difficulties in staying married and the various infidelities in which she and some friends engaged. But she touches equally on alcoholism, the other addiction with which she and several family members have struggled. Her father, novelist John Cheever, was also an alcoholic. Indeed, she suggests that the two may be related. In her biography of Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson (My Name Is Bill, 2004), she briefly mentioned Wilson's wandering eye, but here she speculates more freely as to whether he traded his alcohol addiction for another, equally intoxicating vice. Though married, Wilson was known for his inordinate fondness for other ladies. "When he was able to come up with the brilliant, inspired way of life that enabled him not to drink," Cheever writes, "he used other substances." She also reports that on his deathbed, Wilson requested whiskey three times. In the context of the rest of the book-wide-eyed and often self-indulgent musings about the physiology underlying longing and the insistent, blinding need that accompanies any addiction-it's clear that the author intends this not as an indictment of Wilson, but as further evidence of the mysteries of desire. Unfortunately, for every genuinemystery Cheever asks us to consider, she provides a piece of careless, silly prose to accompany it. Insightful and often engaging, but also aimless and occasionally trite.