About Radical Acts of Love:
How we find hope at the end of life
“In this profound and moving book, oncology nurse Janie Brown recounts twenty conversations she has had with the dying, including some close to her. Each conversation uncovers a different perspective on, and experience of death, while at the same time exploring its universalities. Offering extremely sensitive and wise insight into our final moments, Brown shows practical ways to facilitate the shift from feeling helpless about death to feeling hopeful; from fear to acceptance; from feeling disconnected and alone, to becoming part of the wider, collective story of our mortality.”
— Doubleday CANADA
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Praise for Radical Acts of Love
“For a book that concerns itself with so many ways of coming to terms with death, this remarkable book is hugely life-affirming. It makes you think not just of how you might want to approach death, but of how you might want to live. These conversations from the heart of dying are bold, gracious, often witty and full of love. They accompany you in the dark. Then they let the light in.”
— Jackie Kay / National Poet Laureate of Scotland
“There is no one on earth who cannot benefit from reading this book. The insights, perspectives and wisdom in Radical Acts of Love can transform our approach to the end of life from fear to a sense of adventure.”
— Rachel Naomi remen / author of Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather’s blessings
“Janie Brown opens the door to gaze upon the end of life with lyrical honesty and a big heart. This is a tender, wise, tough, inspiring book, a gift of compassion and understanding.”
— jack kornfield/ Author of A path with heart
“This book is itself, a radical act of love. It is built around the revolutionary notion that we come into this world inside bodies that know how to die, and, as it is with many things, we impoverish ourselves by trying to protect ourselves and our loved ones from that most natural of processes. Reading the stories of these humans, compassionate, ordinary and profound, will help you be with the dying, and to be with yourself, amidst the dying. Like the best books of every genre, this one is wrought with beauty, great care, and attention, and can teach us all how not to look away.”
— pam houston/ Author Deep creek, finding hope in the high country
"A book about love as much as it is about death . . . This is a glorious book that I would not hesitate to give to anyone facing an unwelcome diagnosis or prognosis of their own or of a loved one. It is kind and practical. . I learned so much and feel glad that it exists and convinced that many people will be helped by Brown's generous sharing of more than 30 years' experience of working with the dying"
—CATHY RENTZENBRINK The Times
"Brown is a deeply compassionate and sensitive interlocutor and these accounts brim with humanity . . . Insightful, wise and life-affirming, Brown's book teaches us that sharing someone's final weeks is perhaps the most radical act of love we can offer"
—observer
"Brown's writing can be elegant and powerful . . . The book reframes what it means to heal, which we usually associate with recovery and, therefore, the continuation of life"
—The Guardian
“Janie Brown is a true healer. She is the founder and director of Callanish in Vancouver, BC. She has led over 100 week-long retreats for people with cancer over more than 20 years. Janie’s work is of surpassing beauty and power. Among those who know this work, Janie is regarded as a master teacher. Radical Acts of Love reflects Janie’s ability to help people near death to heal. These teaching stories have the raw power of truth. They show you how you, too, could offer radical acts of love to those near death whose lives you touch. Read these stories and weep. Read them and bring this great work deeper into the world.”
— Michael Lerner / President and Co-Founder Commonweal.org, Author of Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Therapies
“Remarkable. … Everyone ought to read this book, because we are all going to die, and this book will help us to do it with grace and courage. More than that: it will help us help our loved ones to die without fear or regret. What greater gift than that can a book bestow on the reader?”
— Richard Holloway / former Bishop of edinburgh/Author of Waiting for the Last Bus
“Stories are powerful things, and the stories in this book may bring tears. But they will also bring deep understanding, and perhaps even hope, about how we all face life's greatest challenge, death.”
— kate Kirk / chair of arthur rank hospice charity, cicely saunders international/niece of dame cicely saunders, founder of the modern hospice movement
"The most surprising and beautiful travel guide to a journey we will all have to make. Janie Brown has accompanied many great souls through their final days on earth, and what she has learned she offers us now in this exquisite book about life.”
— Chris Cleave / Author of little bee and Everyone brave is forgiven
“The stories in this book are so sad, and frequently had me on the verge of tears - but they are also uplifting and strangely soothing. I wanted to make it last, and savour every encounter, but I ended up racing through it in just a couple of days. Janie Brown's prose is so beautiful, crystalline and evocative, it's like swimming through spring water, so clear you forget it's there. When I closed her book for the last time, I felt as though I'd lived a hundred lives.”
— emily chappell / author of where there’s a will: hope, grief and endurance in a cycle race across a continent
“As the end of life has become ever more medicalised, it’s too easy to blow past the exquisite moments tucked away in our stories, places where healing happens. We have so much to learn from each other. Thank you, Janie, for unlocking this beautiful treasure chest.”
— Dr. BJ Miller / Co-Author of Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death
“Compassionate, sensitive and heart-warming tales of the one thing in life that’s certain.”
— Professor Stephen Westaby, author of Fragile Lives (shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Awards and winner of the BMA President’s Choice Award)
“Janie’s compassion and professional understanding take the reader into places of fear, anger, love and intimacy, loss and grief and show us how the human spirit, even in advanced illness and impending death, can find healing and peace.”
— Ruth Wooldridge, OBE, chair of trustees, Palliative Care works, UK
“An extraordinary book, tender, true and wise.”
— Rev. Joan Jiko Halifax/Abbot, Upaya Zen Center, santa Fe/author of being with dying
“Janie Brown has spent a lifetime opening her heart to the profound mystery of death, which, she writes, can be, and is, a radical act of love. In this book she tells the poignant stories of many people she has helped find the way forward into the unknown. This is a beautiful, wise, and kind record of a life spent listening to the human heart as it approaches its utterly baffling, often disturbing, yet always lovely, culmination.”
— Zoketsu Norman Fischer, poet, zen priest, author of THE WORLD COULD BE OTHERWISE: IMAGINATION AND THE BODHISATTVA PATH
"Janie Brown's extraordinary empathy and intuition coupled with her decades of clinical experience set her book apart from others on the subject of how to help the dying and their loved ones. She is the guide we all hope will be there at the end. Radical Acts of Love does holy work."
— barbara gowdy, / AUTHOR OF LITTLE SISTER AND THE WHITE BONE
“A work of quiet and often devastating courage. Radical Acts of Love is a roadmap, a tool kit and a love song to the human heart. This deeply wise and beautiful book has challenged, comforted and changed me. I will give it to everyone I love.”
— louise Brealey / actor, UK
“These beautiful and necessary stories are a must-read. We have rituals for afterwards: funerals and celebrations of life, but little to help guide those facing death. Janie Brown’s insights, distilled from decades of looking after cancer patients, are both sensitive and practical as well as profoundly compassionate. Tending to the heart and spirit of the terminally ill is as important as making the right medical decisions—decisions that become easier once patients have made peace with themselves and their loved ones.”