A Healing Place

In his new book A Healing Place, author Dermod Judge shares with his readers his very personal quest to find his healing place or places.

He points out that we are all born into a large world. And that for all but a privileged few, it's a cruel world.

He also acknowledges that he was born into a privileged family in Ireland, in a modest house in a desirable part of Dublin.

However, he goes on to explain that even the most privileged amongst us can still receive wounds that require a healing place to which we can retire to while we wait for the wounds to heal or for the hurt to fade.

We learn what he was able to learn. That some books are considered dangerous. Including the Bible, which as a child and a troubled teen, he wasn't allowed to read on his own. There wasn't even a Bible in the family home. He realised that he had to have the scriptures filtered through teachers and clerics for him.

This, he concluded, was that because books (such as the Bible) are considered as dangerous because these books had the very dangerous power to change the world.

This is why libraries are always burned and ransacked by the iron men.

In his book he shares a unique and very interesting series of insights into the human situation, drawing upon the combined wisdom of artists, writers, architects, naturalists and thinkers. But not, interestingly enough, not Nietzsche. (You'll find out why when you read the book.)

This is an amazing and invigorating book, which you will be able to use as a guidebook to your own healing places.

It's written with warmth, wit, wisdom and more than a dash of élan. 

There's also a section of notes for further reading. Or as Dermod puts it: "These notes add an embarrassing whiff of scholarship to this work which is no more than the product of a good library, Google and a mind and memory as capacious as a whore's handbag."

You need this book, because it's rather like a chat with the author over a pint of Guinness, Smithwick's Irish ale, or a drop of Irish single malt.

It's published by The Book Guild at £9.99.