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Sarah Masters reviews the film

Prajna Earth

Picture the scene as the camera captures the immensity of Angkor Wat, the largest temple in the world, which covers more than 500 acres and is fully aligned in term of astronomical calculations, solstices and equinoxes. Share the evening with Buddhist monks and nuns who have traveled for days on pilgrimage to gather there for the full moon.

Visually, Prajna Earth is a wonder, a cinematic journey of the lost spiritual civilization of Angkor in Cambodia, of spiritual sites on Bali and in the jungles of Java.

Prajna in Sanskrit translates as “radiant wisdom” and this documentary is the second in the Yatra Trilogy series, narrated by Sharon Stone. You can select ambient sound with narration or ambient sound alone as you travel to places where Buddhist and Hindu influences have merged with the animistic beliefs of ancient cultures.

Director John Bush writes that he “…wanted to create a new kind of viewing experience that would allow someone to have a direct encounter with the sacred spaces of Southeast Asia. This timeless art and architecture is part of the world's cultural heritage. It's important to archive these things, to share them." He succeeds.

Completed: 2005
Running Time: 85 Minutes
Director/Producer/Cinematographer: John Bush

If you are interested in purchasing this film, you can do so at www.hartleyfoundation.org. Just click on “Masterworks” on the homepage for more information. The cost is $24.95 for the DVD.

Sarah Masters is the Managing Director of the Hartley Film Foundation, a non-profit foundation dedicated to cultivation, support, production and distribution of the best documentaries and audio meditations on world religions, spirituality, ethics and well-being.

Book Review

Chaplain Joan Paddock Maxwell reviews

Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality

Back in my CPE salad days, when I was young and green, a nurse told me, “I can almost always tell when a patient is dying.” “How?” I asked, wildly eager to be let in on such an important medical secret. “When the physicians stop visiting them.”

If you are a hospital chaplain and this scenario sounds familiar to you, then run, do not walk, to your nearest bookstore and get a copy of Final Exam, surgeon Pauline Chen’s extraordinary examination of herself and her medical colleagues and their relationship to death and dying. Her book is a highly readable, deeply personal, yet widely applicable analysis of how physicians are formed throughout their training to fight and deny death, even when the dying process is well advanced. Chen explains how immensely difficult it is to change this reality, and yet how important it is that we do so.

The next time you grieve over a dying patient in the ICU sprouting more lines than a hyacinth bulb has roots, perhaps even though she has an advance directive in her chart, Final Exam will help you better understand the factors at work in the situation. You’ll have learned about the profoundly distancing effect the lengthy and detailed dissection of a human cadaver in the first year of medical school has on young doctors-in-training. You’ll have learned about “turfing,” the way time-challenged physicians pass troubling situations, including discussing dying with a patient, on to someone else. And. you’ll have learned about the multi-million dollar SUPPORT study, which tried to reduce aggressive treatment at the end of life but had no notable improvements on the way terminal patients were treated.

Final Exam is skillfully crafted, weaving detailed personal stories of Dr. Chen’s own life, her medical training, and individual patients she has cared for with the findings of various studies involving the medical treatment of dying people. Trained at Harvard, Northwestern, Yale, the National Cancer Institute, and UCLA, Dr. Chen has turned her own experiences into something of a case study of physician formation. She backs her stories up with a couple of hundred endnotes and a bibliography 18 pages long.

I was surprised at her level of personal revelation, her stories of patients she feels she failed emotionally, her stories of her own family relationships and how they helped shape her attitudes towards death and dying. I was also impressed by how fully digested these stories and experiences seem to be. This is not a hysterical, “tell all” kind of book. Instead, Final Exam is an engaging, reasoned work, vivid and sophisticated, clearly the product of extensive reading, introspection, and analysis.

If the subject of physicians and the treatment of dying people is of interest to you, Final Exam is a must read.

Chen, Pauline W. Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp 268.

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