Reviews & Praise
“Hearts and Minds champions novel research revealing the importance of consciousness in the elaboration of health and illness. It also exposes pernicious resistance to these findings from conventional science and medicine—and offers solutions. No medical approach can be complete if it does not incorporate these vital trends. Highly recommended!” —Larry Dossey, MD, author of One Mind
"A rollicking ride through the philosophical and conceptual quandaries that quantum mechanics has brought to modern science...fresh, conversational, and peppered with penetrating and homely insights, while clearly bringing out the need for going beyond the reductionist paradigm in science.” —Gopi Krishna Vijaya, PhD, Physicist–researcher, Reciprocal System Research Society, Salt Lake City
“I thoroughly enjoyed and admire this compelling book. By thinking and writing with heart and mind, Alexander restores our stereopsis, the depth of field that medical science neither practices nor admits. Here, Alexander brilliantly does both.” —Robert McDermott, Ph.D., President Emeritus, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and author of Steiner and Kindred Spirits“In his engaging, user-friendly and penetrating study of the thinking that underlies orthodox science and medicine, Alexander invites, coaxes, and finally persuades his readers to come to their own awareness of the clear and present danger of [scientific] reductionism.... Reductionism is dangerous because at best it makes no room for, and at worst it outright denies, the willed activity of thinking. If we lose the understanding of the place of our own thinking, we have lost ourselves. Without a tenable experience of that self, an authentic questioning of our place in the social, political, economic, or communal world is meaningless. Hearts and Minds is a book about the possibility of restoration—restoration of the soul that orthodox science has estranged from us as well as from itself.
“Ours is an age of general distrust of expertise and…a particular distrust of medical expertise. For that reason, Alexander’s dispatches from the front lines of today’s medical research and pharmacological trials will be of close interest to every reader.” —Fred Dennehy, associate editor of Being Human (from a review of the book in #23 summer/fall 2019)
“Hearts and Minds: Reclaiming the soul of science and medicine...is a remarkable book. Alexander...takes us directly into an exploration of a central question of our time: Is everything—most important, consciousness (including thinking, feeling, meaning, and values) produced ultimately by dead matter in motion—by neurons, molecules, DNA, hormones, etc?... [Or] is consciousness a reality in its own being, capable, in fact, of having causal effects on the material itself, most especially on the material, human body? Hearts and Minds is a rich offering—always exciting, well-told.... Alexander’s own light touch of humor and irony are a delight, and more than that, serve as a kind of surgical scalpel, which he deftly wields to cut clearly to the most important issues of heart and mind.—Douglas Sloan, PhD, Professor of History and Education Emeritus at Teachers College, Columbia University, and former Adjunct Professor of Religion and Education at Union Theological Seminary and The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. Among his books are Insight–Imagination: The Emancipation of Thought and the Modern Worldand The Redemption of the Animals: Their Evolution, Their Inner Life, and Our Future Together
