BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

Myth: A Very Short Introduction (2004) Robert A Segal   Myth is a disappointing introduction to mythology, a rather plodding book that might be termed 'wikipedia plus' - that is, it is a longer general survey with more authority than you might find online. Ultimately it is a mere enumeration of Western intellectual responses to myth, forced into a straitjacket of being reviewed through the prism of the various disciplines created by the West for the West. The whole is partially built around an extremely weak and irritating attempt to test each set of theories against the Adonis myth. It lacks the narrative coherence of, for example, Glyn Daniels' excellent short history of archaeology. The book has one, surely unintended, effect. This is the realisation that many jobsworth if brilliant thinkers, over the last two hundred or so years, have taken the limited material of the past - incomplete and whose precise context has long since been lost - in order to weave e...

Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past (2001) Douwe Draaisma Teach Yourself Jung (2005 ) Ruth Snowden 50 Psychology Classics (2006) Tom Butler-Bowdon 50 Psychology Ideas You Really Need To Know (2008)  Adrian Furnham Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older is a set of connected but discrete essays opening up a relatively new area for psychology - autobiographical memory. It should be of great value to creative writers. Draaisma (Professor of the History of Psychology at Groningen Unversity) is not afraid to go beyond science into literature in order to demonstrate a point. It is well worth reading if you are interested in how you see the world yourself and why you might do so. It also respects subjectivity in a way that one hopes others, with equal communications skills, will develop.     Teach Yourself Jung is a good basic introduction to Jung's life and thinking. It can be recommended, although Frieda Fordham's 1953 classic text approved by ...