Speaking Endorsements

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RABBI HAROLD S. KUSHNER

Best-selling author, When Bad Things Happen to Good People

To Whom It May Concern:

Some three years ago, I was approached by a young woman after one of my lectures.  She hesitatingly asked me if I would read the manuscript of a book she had written, and I agreed to.  I get a great many requests of that sort, some from established publishers and some from anonymous aspiring writers, perhaps a hundred a year, and I find myself unable to endorse more than a select few.  Most of them are more important for the author to write than for anyone else to read. This one was different.  Terry Wise had written an account of her climbing out of the depths of depression so movingly that I not only agreed to endorse it, I was moved to write the foreword to the book, which was ultimately published under the title Waking Up.

It was an extremely moving account of her husband’s death of ALS and her subsequent depression, leading to a suicide attempt, and how her own determination to live, assisted by a devoted therapist, brought her back to being able to enjoy life.

When Terry lectures on her experience overcoming depression and the temptation to suicide, she not only stirs the emotions of her audience.  She invariably moves several people to come up to her afterward and tell her of their own experiences, and how heartened they were to learn of her victory over depression. In her book, in her talks, in the example of her own life, I am convinced that she saves lives and pulls people out of the darkness that envelopes them.  More than that, people who see whom she has become gain a new understanding of how a person can be apparently hopelessly depressed one day and vital and full of life and hope some days later.  She embodies everything that the Welcome Back awards stand for.

Yours sincerely,

Rabbi Harold Kushner
Author, When Bad Things Happen to Good People