When literary journalist Chip Brown offers up his heart to various healers for mending, the result is a probing, often hilarious journey into the depths of the alternative-medicine movement. Consider the power of mummified bananas. You may call exponents of this diet "woo-woos and wackos," as Brown once did, but as the director of the University of Nevada's Consciousness Research Lab said, "You're wacky before you succeed. Afterwards, you're a genius." Afterwords, You're a Genius should appeal to a much broader readership than most New Age titles because Brown's first-person narrative succeeds in fusing humor, intellect, and curiosity with a dazzling writing style reminiscent of Tom Wolfe. Suddenly, reading about metaphysics is hip, not dippy. Examining not only his own intentions but the healers', Brown's record of his growing awareness of such things as chakra influences is amusing. At the same time, the book asks truly important questions about conventional Western medicine and ponders the meaning of a widespread loss of faith in doctors. While he acknowledges that "most of the secular academic world equates faith with na�ve self-delusion and holds that to entertain the fairy tales of a higher power is to affront the only real higher power, which is reason," he reports that more and more highly educated people are seeking alternative treatment. "Belief," he writes, "is still working some of the weirdest voodoo in the healing world." Highly informative and offering prolific footnotes, Brown struggles with "chronic misgivings," the "ineffable," and logic as he witnesses things that can "no more be corralled in language than the essence of smell." He writes, The trauma in Cynthia's back felt like when you go from a paved road to gravel. Cancer felt like dancing in a mosh pit. The voice of the liver was like a cassette playing too slowly in a Walkman with rundown batteries. The pancreas had an agile, hyper feeling. Lymph nodes felt like humid wind blowing over small grapes. Ultimately, Brown, an award-winning journalist, offers readers a critical look at the field of medicine and metaphysics without supposing solutions. Quoting from great thinkers like Saint Augustine ("Understanding is the reward of faith") and Thomas Sydenham ("the arrival of a good clown exercises more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than twenty asses laden with drugs"), perhaps Brown is most in sync with Emerson, who wrote: "Our life is not threatened so much as our perception." Afterwards, You're a Genius dares to open the doors. --Cristina Del Sesto