Healing Herbs Of Paradise

Should you be starting Healing Herbs of Paradise from the back of the book, you may be discouraged to open the front—the ending eleven pages are pure promotions. Yet author Al Sears created a beautiful, large, expensively produced volume on a single subject: herbal healing. With its large size and outstanding photography (bit too much of the author), this volume easily qualifies as a coffee table book. To gain any benefit from this book, you need to believe in Eastern herbal medicines and healers. Most of the herbs are available in supermarkets and Asian grocery stores, and Sears gives internet sources for those that are more difficult to find. He deals with thirty-six healing plants (some common like ginger, others not so like champak). For each Sears attributes many healing or preventive powers for the human body, for pineapple as many as twenty-one. You’ll find simple recipes (often teas) on how to ingest the herbs. His knowledge, collection, and photography is mostly from Bali, Indonesia with the assistance of a local couple, he an herb farmer and she a fifth-generation healer. Sears’ writing is excellent, full of stories, and the text has superscript numbers referring to his bibliography of research.