BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties (2009) Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner Interviewed and Edited By Gary Bravo  The ghost at the centre of this invaluable testimony about the early days of consciousness studies surrounding drugs that alter mental states is, of course, the late Dr. Timothy Leary. This is the well edited transcript of a conversation, mediated by Gary Bravo, between Leary's two main associates in the experimentation that took place, first at Harvard, then at various experimental locations and finally at the Millbrook Commune, between 1960 and 1966 - Richard Alpert (here in his later ego as Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner. Both Dass and Metzner moved on from psychedelic studies to Eastern Tradition spiritual and West Coast consciousness studies respectively, while Leary became part of something that might be called part cultural phenomenon and part resistance movement against authority that h...

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 ...

How To Get Rich (2008) Felix Dennis     Over a decade ago, I passed this book straight on to my late teenage son, not because of its insights into business (although it rings true on that account) but because of its insights into human nature and into the world 'out there' that he was going to have to negotiate in the coming years. Like all sons, he might not listen to his Dad (and no real reason why he should) but he might listen to 'uncle' Felix. I have no idea if he actually read it or not but I am rather proud of how he turned out (not much to do with me and a lot to his mother). Why should have read it and why should it be read by all young adults with a mind to dabbling in the world of capitalism? Because Felix Dennis is going to stop him wasting a lot of time believing that some people are nicer and cleverer than they are or that reading those idiotic books about leadership from people who could not navigate their way to an ice cream parlour on a hot day ...