cover image Whose Hands Are These?: A Gifted Healer's Miraculous True Story

Whose Hands Are These?: A Gifted Healer's Miraculous True Story

Gene Egidio, Egidio. Warner Books, $24.95 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-446-52045-4

As a child, Egidio allegedly saw auras around people, could sense when they were sick and what was wrong with them, sometimes foresaw the future and once healed a neighbor's thumb that had been nearly sliced through simply by holding it. For this, he was taken to priests and doctors, and finally institutionalized for a year and forced to endure repeated electric shock treatments. These measures did not eliminate Egidio's powers, but taught him to hide them and to keep up a facade of, as he puts it, ""Mr. Normal."" He grew up, served in the navy, married, raised a family and worked as an electrician. After 25 years, when he suddenly lost his wife, his money and his business, he felt ""the universe gave me a wake-up call that was impossible to ignore,"" and returned to healing, this time as his life's work. Egidio now runs a clinic, and likens the healing he does to ""jump-starting a car,"" allowing energy ""from the universe"" to pass from him to others. But while his hands may be gifted at healing, they wield a pen awkwardly. Egidio's memoir contains some distracting scenes (e.g., a discussion about UFOs with a Russian reporter), fails to make full use of its recurring theme of electricity as a potentially unifying metaphor--and, most crucially, rests on simplistic metaphysics (""The body is merely a servant of the mind""). Still, healing is a charismatic power, and Egidio could reach a wide readership with this book. Author tour. (Aug.)