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All of Jack Vance’s books have alot to offer.  Vance is an extraordinary wordsmith and his fantastical worlds are a pleasure to escape into albeit many portray the dark / shadow side of humanity.  This book’s a special one and hard to find.  Also published as "The Nopalgarth", if you can find it read it!

Females can be every bit as mean as men they just do it in a different way.  Women seem to talk alot more about men’s abuse of women while women’s abuse of women is rarely brought up as a problem.  In my life, there’s been as much or more of the latter.  As Atwood clearly shows in this book, women’s meanness can be extremely spiteful and uncaring and can leave damaging scars that are quite profound.  Often girls who are treated this way grow up to prefer men who seem to bring more acceptance and less grief to their lives.

Margaret Atwood’s creative ability for description alone makes this book a worthwhile read.  Her writing conjures up sensory experiences that are utterly unique, surprsing and yet familiar at the same time.  Her observations are of new, uncliched discoveries, even while she is talking about an everyday, normally overlooked object.   The psychological complexity woven with her descriptive abiliity makes an interesting and provoking read.

This is the first book I have read by Atwood but I look forward to reading others.

I’ve read all of Jack Vance’s books at least twice.  Then there are my favorite Vance books like Rhialto the Marvelous which I reread with great satisfaction every 3 or 4 years.

The book is collection of linked stories revolving around Rhialto, magician extraordinaire.  To sample some of Vance’s other works, check here.

John Brunner describes a world overrun by consumerism, and corporate politics which is, at the time of writing, in the future.  

The book is wild and strange and also a bit spooky since that future has arrived.

Ronald Hayman’s biography of Jung starts out reasonably well but starts quickly degenerating into a Jung bashing fest around page 200.  For instance Hayman states that "Jung thought it healthier to blame death on witchcraft, sorcery or magic than on old age, disease or accident." (p.224)  Anyone who’s read even a little Jung would see the silliness in this claim right away.  The documentation Hayman provides for this claim is a quote, not of Jung’s, but from someone Jung once studied!

In another section Hayman calls Jung a cult leader and compares him to Jim Jones!(p.239) Jim Jones was the master mind behind the mass murder of 900 people via cyanide poisoning and gunshot wounds.  I’m hard pressed to understand how C.G. Jung can be compared with him.  But Hayman (who is noted to be a Freudian) apparently wants people to dislike Jung so much that he’s willing to intimate a connection between the two.  If Hayman is just sparring for a Freud vs. Jung fight then a pro-Freudian argument using sound logic and fact might serve his cause better than the ludicrous and mean spirited connotation that Jung and Jones have something in common.

Hayman tries to paint a dismal picture of Jung as a lazy mimicker by quoting what he falsely claims is Jung’s wife’s description of her husband’s type (based on Jung’s Personality Type system).  Hayman refers to a lecture Emma Jung gave on the Introverted Sensate type saying her statements were "based on her relationship with Jung."   But Jung isn’t an Introverted Sensate type at all.  In fact, his type, an Introverted Intuitive according to his wife and all those who knew him, is considered to be almost opposite to the type his wife described in the lecture Hayman quotes. Worse than this, Hayman’s sole "proof" that Emma, Jung’s wife, is describing her husband is that she uses the personal pronoun "he" in her lecture, not "she." (p.293)  Wow! With this kind of logic the world could be reinvented any which way in any moment.

While I find a good argument worth reading even if I strongly disagree, this kind of utter silliness starts to cast a dim light on every word the author says.  I’d have to concede that much of the book is very well written and at cursory glance, appears to be well documented, but boondoggles like this started leaving me wishing I was doing chores or taking a nap.

One is left with the impression that Hayman has made no attempt whatsoever to understand even the most basic tenets of Jung’s work and instead is hell bent on making distorted, unsupported claims that attempt to misrepresent Jung’s life.  To my mind, that’s the last thing a biographer should do.

Read a copy here.

The first time I read The Way of Man by Martin Buber I felt like I was free falling into the abyss that would lead me home. I was amazed that the written word could have so strong an effect on me. But more disarming was the fact that patriarchal, religious words describing Hasidism could have such an effect on me; a very unconventional, anti-authoritarian freethinker. Despite this, I came away from reading “Way of Man” with a deep sense of having glimpsed home; all the salient details were there. In fact, I was high on Buber’s “Way of Man” for days after reading it.

I eagerly purchased “I and Thou” by Buber thinking to find more soul awakening reading only to find the book confused and incomprehensible. I did better with “Meetings” but the book also didn’t move me in any personal way.

Still “The Way of Man” has become one of my most cherished texts. It really defines the path with the heart for a person who is both fiercely adamant in their quest for individuality and who simultaneously deeply cares for and feels profoundly connected to humanity.

I’ve spent the last few weeks engrossed in this fascinating biography of C.G. Jung. The author is not a Jung "devotee" and you can see her efforts to present all sides of every issue. Her vignettes give several, sometimes conflicting, views of Jung’s character and work which effected his immediate circle of family, friends and acquaintances as well as the world of psychology in numerous, often disparate ways. This is a fascinating read if you are at all interested in Jung and/or his theories.

If I could only keep one cookbook it would be this one.  From instructions on purchasing the right knife to overviews of how to bake, steam, roast, and saute most every vegetable you can think of, this book has it all.  It has excellent pizza recipes, lots of good soups and much much more.

Excerpt from the book

This Princeton Field Guide has especially beautiful photographs as well as text on crystallography and other geological features of over 500 minerals.

 Excerpt from the book

Excerpt from the book