Patricia Pearson has narrated 2 audiobooks on Listento.it by 1 author, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine).
A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine)
Summary
Patricia Pearson returns to nonfiction with a witty, insightful, and highly personal look at recognizing and coping with fears and anxieties in our contemporary world. The millions of North Americans who silently cope with anxiety at last have a witty, articulate champion in Patricia Pearson, who shows that the anxious are hardly "nervous nellies" with "weak characters" who just need medicine and a pat on the head. Instead, Pearson questions what it is about today's culture that is making people anxious, and offers some surprising answers - as well as some inspiring solutions based on her own fierce battle to drive the beast away. Drawing on personal episodes of incapacitating dread as a vivid, often hilarious guide to her quest to understand this most ancient of human emotions, Pearson delves into the history and geography of anxiety. Why are North Americans so much more likely to suffer than Latin Americans? Why did Darwin treat hypochondria with sprays from a hose? Why have we forgotten the insights of some of our greatest philosophers, theologians and psychologists in favor of prescribing addictive drugs? In this blend of fascinating reportage and poignant memoir, Pearson ends with her struggle to withdraw from antidepressants and to find more self-aware and philosophically grounded ways to strengthen the soul.
©2008 Patricia Pearson (P)2020 Penguin Random House Canada
Opening Heaven's Door
Summary
From the award-winning, groundbreaking author of A Brief History of Anxiety...Yours and Mine comes a touching, exhilarating, challenging exploration of the inexplicable gleamings of another world many of us experience, in life, in grief, and near death. Sparked by extraordinary experiences that occurred in her family when her father and her sister both died in 2008, Patricia Pearson was launched on a journey of investigation into what she calls "a curious sort of modern underground - a world beneath the secular world, inhabited by ordinary human beings having extraordinary experiences that they aren't, on the whole, willing to disclose". Roughly half the bereaved population, about 20 percent of those near death who recover, and an unreported number of the dying witness or experience a sensed presence, the mystery of near-death awareness, and, if they are not in horrible pain or medicated into unconsciousness, rationally inexplicable feelings of transcendence and grace as they depart on the journey from which none of us return. Pearson brings us effortlessly into her illuminating quest for answers, inspiring us to own up to experiences we may never have shared with anyone. Secular or religious, all of us wonder deeply about these things if we let ourselves, and also about the medical, social, and psychological implications of understanding what it means to pass through heaven's door.
©2014 Patricia Pearson (P)2020 Penguin Random House Canada