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    Sometimes Brilliant: The Impossible Adventure of a Spiritual Seeker and Visionary Physician Who Helped Conquer the Worst Disease in History
    Sometimes Brilliant: The Impossible Adventure of a Spiritual Seeker and Visionary Physician Who Helped Conquer the Worst Disease in History
    Sometimes Brilliant: The Impossible Adventure of a Spiritual Seeker and Visionary Physician Who Helped Conquer the Worst Disease in History
    Audiobook12 hours

    Sometimes Brilliant: The Impossible Adventure of a Spiritual Seeker and Visionary Physician Who Helped Conquer the Worst Disease in History

    Written by Larry Brilliant

    Narrated by Fred Sanders

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    When a powerful mystic steps on the hand of a radical young hippie doctor from Detroit, it changes lives and the world. Sometimes Brilliant is the adventures of a philosopher, mystic, hippie, doctor, groundbreaking tech innovator, and key player in the eradication of one of the worst pandemics in human history. His story, of what happens when love, compassion and determination meet the right circumstances to effect positive change, is the kind that keeps hope and the sense of possibility alive.

    After sitting at the feet of Martin Luther King at the University of Michigan in 1963, Larry Brilliant was swept up into the civil rights movement, marching and protesting across America and Europe. As a radical young doctor he followed the hippie trail from London over the Khyber Pass with his wife Girija, Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm commune to India. There, he found himself in a Himalayan ashram wondering whether he had stumbled into a cult. Instead, one of India’s greatest spiritual teachers, Neem Karoli Baba, opened Larry’s heart and told him his destiny was to work for the World Health Organization to help eradicate killer smallpox. He would never have believed he would become a key player in eliminating a 10,000-year-old disease that killed more than half a billion people in the 20th century alone.

    Brilliant’s unlikely trajectory, chronicled in Sometimes Brilliant, has brought him into close proximity with political leaders, spiritual masters, cultural heroes, and titans of technology around the world—from the Grateful Dead to Mikhail Gorbachev, from Ram Dass, the Dalai Lama, Lama Govinda, and Karmapa to Steve Jobs and the founders of Google, Salesforce, Facebook, Microsoft and eBay and Presidents Carter, Clinton, Bush and Obama. Anchored by the engrossing account of the heroic efforts of the extraordinary people involved in smallpox eradication in India, this is a riveting and fascinating epidemiological adventure, an honest reckoning of an entire generation, and a deeply moving spiritual memoir. It is a testament to faith, love, service, and what it means to engage with life’s most important questions in pursuit of a better, more brilliant existence.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateOct 11, 2016
    ISBN9780062652522
    Author

    Larry Brilliant

    LARRY BRILLIANT, M.D., M.P.H., is a pioneering physician, visionary technologist, and global philanthropist. The first executive director of Google.org, he currently serves as chairman of Skoll Global Threats Fund. Larry co-founded the The Seva Foundation, whose programs and partners have restored sight to more than 4 million blind in dozens of countries. He has worked with four Presidents, the UN, G8 and Chaired the National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee. He co-founded one of the first digital social networks, the Well. He and his wife Girija and their children live in Northern California.

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    Reviews for Sometimes Brilliant

    4.5/5

    7 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      What a life’s story! Simply inspirational, fun, amazing and brilliant??
    • 5/5
      This is such an inspiring book, and I had started from a position of skepticism. When I first heard that Google had hired Dr Brilliant to run Google.org I knew little about him and could only see Google messing up the opportunity.

      Reading the story of his legacy is amazing. How he was brought up, what his father stood up for, what he stood up for, all wonderful background. And then he really was destined for and instrumental in eradicating smallpox.

      But then the stories he brings... such enjoyable reads, they are almost like 1001 Nights, each story brings another, brings another. Worth every minute, and I was sad when the book finished. But what a happy ending it was for humanity.
    • 5/5
      Such an excellent book! It's non-fiction. It has adventure, intrigue, miracles, suffering, and divine love. This is a book everyone can enjoy.