No comments about Why Did Freud Reject God?: A Psychodynamic Interpretation.

No comments about H.J.S. Guntrip: A Psychoanalytical Biography.

3 comments about Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna.

1. Australian philosopher Peter Singer, now a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, has written a thoughtful, well-researched portrait of his grandfather, David Oppenheim, who perished in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943. "We all know that six million Jews died," writes Singer in the Prologue, "but that is a mind-numbing statistic. I have a chance to portray one of them as an individual."

   His grandfather was a classical scholar in Vienna, a teacher of Greek and Latin at a prestigious gymnasium (high school), and an active participant in the city's psychoanalytic circles as a collaborator, then critic of Sigmund Freud, and a friend and supporter of Alfred Adler, the first of Freud's colleagues to defect from his inner circle over basic disagreements about psychoanalytic theory.
   
   Oppenheim's wife, Amalie (a math and physics scholar in her own right) was also sent to Theresienstadt, but she survived, the only one of Singer's four grandparents to do so. She moved to Australia in 1946, the year Singer was born, and lived with his family for nine years until her death in 1955. Singer went on to study philosophy at Oxford and teach at Monash University in Australia, but always in the background there was a cloud of sadness and silence that hung over his family's recent past. (On his mother's side he comes from a long line of rabbis stretching back to the seventeenth century.)

   His aunt's master's thesis about her father inspired Singer to learn more about his grandfather and write this book. He collected his grandfather's personal papers, letters between his grandparents before their marriage that he retrieved from his aunt's attic, and letters his grandparents wrote to his parents and aunt after they emigrated to Australia in 1938. Singer also travelled to Vienna to see where his grandparents lived and visit the school where his grandfather taught. He searched for additional pertinent information in the Austrian archives, interviewed his grandfather's surviving students, and went to Theresienstadt to see for himself where his grandfather died. Singer believed that reading through his grandfather's vast collection of writings in German, most of them in longhand that was difficult to read, would be "to undo, in some infinitely small but still quite palpable way, a wrong done by the Holocaust."

   The final part of the book describes the departure of the children to Australia in 1938 after the Anschluss, the illusory hope that life would somehow go on, the desperate efforts from faraway Melbourne to save the parents from the impeding catastrophe, and finally Theresienstadt. During his research Singer also learned what happened to his paternal grandparents: the Germans transported them to Lodz in Poland (after that they were probably gassed at Chelmno).

   Professor Singer's well-crafted tribute to his grandfather and the lost world of Jewish Vienna is a valuable contribution to Holocaust remembrance and mourning.

   --Charles Patterson, Ph.D., author of ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust




2. An excellent and important story that needs to be told over and over again. But for those of us who use non-fiction books such as this for research as well, this book lacks a crucial element--an index. I could not recommend this book to someone researching information on the Holocaust because there is no way for someone to retrieve important information without laboriously searching page by page through the book. When will publishers learn what researchers and librarians know, a non-fiction book without an index is not complete?



3. This is a compelling and frequently moving account of the author's grandparents' lives from the turn of the century in Vienna to the middle years of the twentieth century. The grandparents, David and Amalie Oppenheim, had both the good and bad fortune to live through some of the most interesting and tragic times of the last century. As young, educated, middle-class Jews living in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century, they experienced the last days of the Hapsburg empire, the intellectual currents of the time and place (including being part of Freud's circle), the first world war, the depression, anti-semitism, Nazism and the Holocaust, as well as the great intellectual achievements of Austro-German culture.

   The book is a fascinating account of the period, as well as the curious relationship between David and Amalie, whose homosexual feelings towards others seem to lead them into marriage and children of their own. The final chapters, describing post-Anschluss Vienna, the ghetto conditions in which they were forced to live, and finally Theresienstadt concentration camp are harrowing and moving. As a memoir rather than a history, the book is written well and reads easily; though there are references to other works, it is not in any way dull or academic. The author's frequent comparisons between his grandfather's way of thinking and his own are I feel a little forced, but this is only a minor quibble, especially when the humanity of both the author and the grandparents about whom he is writing is evident. Highly recommended.

   One book which Singer refers to frequently is Stefan Zweig's "The World of Yesterday", which I would also highly recommend to anyone interested in the period or subject matter.

3 comments about A Need to Know: The Clandestine History of a CIA Family.

1. Imagine your child starts asking questions about your family. Imagine you don't have any answers.
   
   Imagine your father left you three things when he died: a Bible, a well-worn copy of The Great Gatsby, and a diary. Oh, and lots of questions.
   
   Imagine you found out Dad was actually an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency.
   
   Welcome to the beginning of Bud Goodall's dilemma. This book is Goodall's attempt to make sense of a childhood enmeshed in secrecy.
   
   Like all good writers, Goodall doesn't tell us what is happening, he shows us. Wonderfully written, A Need to Know is a family story, a historical record, and a detective novel wrapped up into one. At times it is simultaneously tense, sorrowful, and enlightening. With the care of a researcher and the writing style of a novelist, Goodall enchants the reader, pushing and pulling us through the mazes, twists, turns and terrifying truth of living through a family slowly torn apart by secrets - all in the name of National Security during the years of the Cold War.
   
   Just as in his previous works - Casing a Promised Land and Living the Rock n Roll Mystery - Goodall takes you inside. You see what he sees. You learn what he learns.
   
   Goodall has done it again. Only this time he's done it better.



2. In the preface of this book Goodall explains that he writes it for his son, Nic, in order to answer questions he often asked about his grandparents. He also writes the book for his father and namesake, his mother, and for himself. As a reader and autobiographical writer, I can't help but feel that he also wrote the book for me, and others like me, who have an incomplete family narrative and needed a template to follow. He says he wrote the book "to help others find in [his] story a way to understand their own." I have.
   
   Joining personal narrative, politics, memory and honesty, this amazing book reads as a conversation with the author as he invites the reader to join him on a journey that collapses time and offers a history lesson with a storyline. As a writer he helps me imagine it and see it. As a storyteller he helps me understand it. It is beautifully written!
   
   This work is unique and enchanting. Carefully orchestrated and outlined, we follow Goodall as he traces a legacy that began before he was born. He uncovers secrets, discovers himself, and recovers his "narrative inheritance." I found myself reading in the midst of the noise and chaos of a busy airport and full household, yet not being distracted from the places, the people, the implications, the pain, and the story he tells. The story echoes in my head even now that I have read the last pages and returned to the beginning to read it again.
   
   Goodall says his parents left him "a gift of understanding history in a very human way." He selflessly shares this gift with readers.
   
   I highly recommend it!



3. I was fortunate to obtain an advance copy of Dr. Goodall's book. The time period spanned corresponds to the evolution of American intelligence and counterintelligence. To intelligently overlay a personal history upon this era without too much emotion or editorialization is a unique talent that Dr. Goodall obviously posesses. To be able to write in a manner that flows from one chapter to the next is an ability that not all writers are capable of. Anyone who has an interest in this period of history will find this narrative enlightening from many perspectives.

1 comments about Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle.

1. Deftly compiled and edited by Susan Stanford Friedman (Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women's Studies and Chair of the English Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison), Analyzing Freud: Letters of H. D., Bryher, And their Circle is a fascinating, informative primary source providing invaluable insights into the life and work of the famous father of modern psychoanalysis -- Sigmund Freud. The poet H. D. was one of Freud's patients in 1933 and 1934; her letters to her novelist companion Bryher (which often revolve around the hours she spent with Freud), offer a unique glimpse into the inception of psychoanalysis, the modern-day science of the mind. Analyzing Freud is a very highly recommended, essential, seminal addition to History Of Psychology reference shelves and supplemental reading lists.

5 comments about Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy.

1. The Uses of Enchantment (Penguin Psychology)
   
   First, it is good to get all evidence and opinion out and above board. This should be true of everyone no matter if one is an ethnical or religious person Jew or Christian. Then, there is a matter of how this should be done? Where it should be done? When it should be done? Why? For instance, if persons or person passionate few agrieved against a group or political body they should attack prudently but immediately. Strike when the iron is hot as the old adage goes. No time to waste! Whistle blowing on companies are best done by individual(s) when their is enough information and evidence to find guilty in a court of law. And so should it be with doctors and hospitals, persons and people of positions of extra-ordinary trust and power over others. Not only for the patient-personal reasons but so the rest of us can be aware of malpratice and the knowledge that all that is white and professional fascade is NOT okay. Put on guard by those who are insiders. However, and this is how the case of trying to destroy the reputation and thereby Dr. Bettelheim was done, it was done long after the fact, after the doctor was dead(and as it handily happened for his detractors by his own hand) and in such a dramatic concerted media trial like ganging



2. I simply wish to say that there would no controversy if thoughtful, sensitive people were in control of their own emotions and were objective enough to put Bruno Bettelheim and his times in perspecitve. This is one of the implicit themes of the book.The author, a journalist, has study the facts and has the intuition to understand as much as any biographer can at this time a complex suffering personality. I hope only that the time will come when such a understanding can be objectively drawn. But meanwhile the biographer has made at least this attentive and by no means unskeptical reader understand the controversy and the facts of the case are not always one and the same...



3. The reviewers who praised this book didn't check the facts and neither did the author. In fact, the book is highly inaccurate both in its facts and conclusions. The book merely applies the same pseudopsychoanalysis as the subject applied to his "patients," including me.

   I was a source for the book and nearly everything in it about me is totally wrong. I shared considerable information with the author following a 1990 article in the Washington Post I wrote detailing Bettelheim's unsupported claims and physical and psychological abuse of his wards. The author promised that I could control anything that appeared in the book about me. But the book came out with all sorts of unsourced untruths about me that the author never bothered to check with me. From the looks of them, I suspect some she made up and some she heard from Bettelheim's defenders who worked at the school and broke their professional code of silence to reveal "information" about a "patient." It evidently never occured to the author that these people may have wanted to smear me to save their own reputations. The author even had the nerve to state as fact how I was feeling, which is amazing because she never asked me. In fact, I never felt the way she said I felt.

   The book just amounted to the same type of Freudian nonsense I was subject to at Bettleheim's school -- someone else telling you that you don't feel what you feel -- you really feel what I tell you you feel. The book even managed to completely misrepresent what I wrote in the Washington Post. I have been quoted in many publiciations on this and other matters but I have never seen anything so far from the truth. The author didn't like my thesis and couldn't get me on the facts, so she apparently made up her own.

   Immediately upon the book's publication, I notified the publisher by letter of the book's errors, but the publisher never corrected them in subsequent printings. And no one even had the decency to answer my letter. To this very day, the company continues to sell a book it knows is inaccurate.




4. This book moved me deeply. Not only did it tell me a fascinating story about a man whose life span the century, but it moved me deeply. It's not a funny book, but it is a riveting one. Rather than pretending to know it all, the author takes her reader on an investigative journey: Who was the true Bettelheim? She shares her doubts as well as her discoveries some of which I shall never forget. And in the end, everything seems to fall into place - the good, the bad, everything human, I guess.



5. As a former student at Dr. Bettelheim's school in Chicago, I found this book to be very inadaquate in its description of Dr. Bettelheim. This man did a great deal of harm to the students attending this school and was not the savior which Ms. Sutten would like him to be potrayed as. His methods of treatment can be compared with how the German Nazis treated their concentration camp victims. He did beat the students a great deal and fear was a common, shared, feeling which most of the kids felt towards him. His use of imtimadation towards the children, as well as the staff, was complete. Since Ms. Sutton was not a student at the Orthogenic School, of course she would not know the things that went on there. If Bettelheim was alive today, he would be arrested for child abuse, and this is a fact that Ms. Sutton doesn't want to admit.

No comments about The Lost Itinerary of Frank Hamilton Cushing (Southwest Center Series).

5 comments about The Magic Daughter: A Memoir of Living with Multiple Personality Disorder.

1. While this book is a refresher from the cliches about Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly Multiple Personality Disorder that "Sybil" and "The Three Faces of Eve" created, I was still sorely disappointed in this book. One thing that bothers me that there are people who view DID as an exotic condition and who go to great lengths to try to convince others they are hosts to other personalities. Instead of being exotic, it is a devastating condition that has cost people their jobs, families and in some cases their lives. Cases have been reported where one personality was out to kill another and as a result, the "host" or "core" personality was the casualty.
   
   The author, who is identified as "Jane Phillips" started this book as a suicide note. A survivor of fraternal incest and neglectful parents, she makes her way through therapists and treatments until one therapist, with whom she has established rapport finally realizes through researching DID that she does indeed have this condition.
   
   To this book's credit, Phillips is nothing like the stereotypes that currently exist about DID. She does not have any extraordinary artistic ability that "surfaces" in other personalities; she is a college professor; she is somehow able to keep herselves in check while at work. Embarrassing moments do crop up, such as when she has no recollection of someone her alters have met.
   
   One part that I really loved was when Jane went toy shopping at the behest of her child alters. They implored her not to buy "some dumb bear with a dumb expression on his face" and "no dumb bears, ever!" As one who also dislikes bears, that made me smile.
   
   Sexual abuse is often the taproot of DID. Jane was raped by her older brother; when she was in college, she became involved with a violent man named "Jack" who raped her when she insisted that he move out.
   
   Like the famous (or infamous) Sybil before her, Jane had "fugue" states that she dated back to middle school. She finally, at age 30 enlists therapy after suffering from migraines and panic attacks.
   
   Her childhood was paradoxical. On the one hand, she was cherished as she was the only daughter and girls were a rarity in her family. On the other hand, she was penalized for her feminity. Jane's mother bought her a doll one Christmas that Jane didn't want and insisted she play with it; whenever Jane left it alone for long intervals, her mother would hound her to play with it, all the while telling her how lucky she was to have such a thing.
   
   Jane's growing feminity was measured and recorded by her mother; her breasts, hips and cycles were duly noted and she was not given any privacy regarding these very intimate matters. When Jane makes decisions for herself, such as going into therapy in adulthood, her parents systematically and symbolically cut her out of their lives by having pictures of her removed. Her mother makes irrational comments such as Jane's silver baby cup "is none of her business." That sounded completely illogical.
   
   I didn't like this book and felt it "glided" through some of the more harrowing aspects of DID. This book is like bare bones compared to many other excellent, well-rounded works on this subject. I recommend "First Person Plural," "Katherine It's Time," "Shatter," and all the books Chris Sizemore, aka Eve has written about her own experiences with DID.



2. Most of us think of Multiple Personality Disorder in terms of 'Sybil,' or 'The Three Faces of Eve,' or that California serial killer who claimed the rest of him was innocent. To us, it's an exotic craziness that either doesn't exist or is sensationally unpredictable and dangerous.

   Phillips, pseudonymous author of 'The Magic Daughter,' not only makes the disorder (now called Dissociative Identity Disorder) credible, she puts one scared and human face on it. Phillips' memoir began in April 1993 as a suicide note. But in trying to explain why life was too difficult to bear, she became absorbed in the project and it eventually became a means of integrating her "selves."

   Phillips fits none of the stereotypes. She's a college professor whose students and colleagues are unaware of her disorder. She was considered thorough - because several selves would independently do her work, each needing to ensure it was done correctly - unbeknownst to Jane herself. She learned to cover when greeted by people she didn't remember. Nothing was more relaxing than hours spent gazing into the mirror, communing with a parade of faces, young, old, boyish, feminine, wise and foolish - none of which seemed to be hers. But just getting through a normal day could be exhausting as she fought to control conflicting emotions and maintain a moment to moment chronology.

   Since junior high she had been secretly aware of something wrong. "Mostly I just never seemed to be who I really was - although I had no idea who that was." All through college, through marriage to an alcoholic, she thought of seeing a psychiatrist but all she could think to ask was "What's wrong with me? Why is life so hard?"

   At 30, she finally sought help after a summer tormented by headaches, profound depression and uncontrollable bouts of terror and anger during which she tore out all the flowers in her beloved garden, carried a gasoline can to the house intending to burn the place down and spent hours in her closet crying because none of the clothes seemed to belong to her. But she was still, despite the psychologist's prodding, unable to express what she wanted out of therapy.

   Probing her childhood, the therapist precipitated a wrench back in time. "Suddenly, weirdly, I was nine years old again." Out came memories - the anger and violence of her older brother, Hank, who had tormented his younger siblings. And attempted to rape his sister Jane, failing only because their parents arrived home unexpectedly. "I couldn't tell if I had remembered it or made it up."

   Her brother's attacks and elaborate malice - much of it sexual - continued throughout her childhood. But there was another side to her home life. On both sides her family was overrun with boys. She was the girl all the adults had been waiting for. She was petted and loved and expected to rectify all the deficiencies of her mother's childhood. Failure to measure up was met with anger and recriminations. It was a turbulent, tormented childhood, but many children suffer worse horrors.

   Multiplicity, says Phillips, has three main causes. The first is a predisposing brain chemistry, second is trauma and third is a lack of recognition or acceptance of that trauma by adults.

   While she was recognized as dissociative early on, she was not diagnosed as a multiple until five years into therapy. Her memoir brings home to the reader how thin the line is between normal emotional turmoil and a fragmented personality. Even some of her truly bizarre symptoms, such as an inability to distinguish between current and remembered pain, or to explain symptoms before another personality takes over and the symptoms disappear, arouse empathy.

   This passionate, harrowing journey towards self-understanding and, ultimately, integration, makes unusual demands on the reader. Perception is a solitary thing - Phillips believed for years that everyone had psyches like hers but other people were braver and smarter about life. It's not the fragments themselves that defy comprehension but the wholeness and separateness of them - the personalities that remain forever 5 or 15, personalities that know only fear or loneliness or anger. With this book, Phillips makes it possible to understand how she protected her core by snapping off bits of herself which then took on particular functions in daily life, setting up a cycle which made her days almost impossible to negotiate.




3. The Magic Daughter: A Memoir of Living With Multiple Personality Disorder, by Jane Phillips (pseudonym) is the first-person narrative of a woman who suffers multiple personality disorder -- more precisely dissociative identity disorder (DID) -- most of her life. Since the author does not have the typical chronological concept of time until, for the most part, the end of the narrative, the book is composed of snippets of recollections and experiences with each chapter encompassing a theme. Oddly, however, the book does nonetheless have a peculiar linear fabric to the recollections. Apparently, to some extent, the author also recognizes this toward the end of the book.

   My reading this book was not one of choice. I was assigned this topic in an Abnormal Psychology course two years ago. However, after finding this book, I was still reluctant upon reading it, expecting it to be dull. (My apologies to those suffering from DID who found support and enlightenment in this book.) Suprisingly I found the book very engaging, regardless of its non chronological sequence, and the author's quite fluid writing style.
   
   Nonetheless, on the negative side, most of the way thru it I found myself feeling doubtful. I began doubting either the authenticity of this work or the writer's sincerity. However, that feeling is probably groundless....

   The negative criticisms I have are that there are certainly some unanswered questions; for that matter unraised questions in the text. But, if this work is authentic, it very well may have been that the writer wrote this more for herself than for others.

   Secondly, it is interesting to note again that if Jane had MPD, her disorder was not nearly of the severity as other noteworthy cases I have read about including the case of Chris Sizemore upon whose experiences the book and movie The Three Faces of Eve were based. There are similarities between Chris Sizemore's experiences and Jane's, however, it is difficult to get beyond the sense that much of Jane's supposed MPD symptoms and experiences did not result after, and as a result of the diagnosis of MPD.

   Nevertheless, it was a very good read. Engaging, thought provoking.




4. Like only a handful of books written about multiplicity, this one was written by the multiple herself, rather than her therapist. However, unlike so many other multiple-written books, this one was actually decently composed. Which, after attempting such poorly-crafted tomes as I'm Eve and Prism, was an enthusiastically received change.

   The Magic Daughter also differs from other multiplicity books in one other, significant way. Though arranged in rough chronological order, this book is more a series of personal essays than an autobiography. While this is frustrating in one regard--in that not all "plot threads" are adequately resolved--it allows the writer to avoid rehashing less than interesting moments in her life and concentrate on the issues that she truly wants to handle.

   Although I know multiples who truly hated this book, I enjoyed it highly. On numerous occasions, I found myself reflected in its pages. I was easily able to identify with passages such as:

   "Life is hard! I want to shriek. My head aches, my mind roars with voices, I have no extra money, I'm exhausted, and I can barely think straight. I scream in the night, my body aches with remembered abuses, and therapy requires that I recall and then relive those old, horrifying traumas."

   Perhaps if she had focused on the happier moments of multiplicity, her story may have been more endearing to empowered multiples. To her, however, multiplicity is something that needs to be cured, though she does acknowledge it may have causes completely unrelated to abuse.

   "I suddenly felt unnerved. Her therapist was a man who'd made a substantial name for himself because of his work with abuse survivors; he often lectured and offered workshops. For some reason, I blurted out that I'd been multiple three, maybe four years before I was sexually abused." (Italics mine.)

   Sadly Phillips does not deal with natural multiplicity for more than a few paragraphs. Perhaps such an exploration would have been out of place in this book, which is focused more or the end of multiplicity than its beginnings. It does not end happily with integration, though. While Phillips does make inroads towards that goal in the final half of the book, she is only at the start of the process when the book ends, with much work still ahead of her.

   How she handles integration may make many multiples wary. She simply decides to stop dissociating, that she's had enough. It's not that cut and dried, but that is the brunt of it. And, as she is seen in this book very much as the core personality, she believes that she can simply stop, much as one can stop chewing their nails. Multiplicity is simply a more elaborate and debilitating habit.

   And that's where she'll lose a lot of multiples, especially those that truly love and care for their system mates. Still, whether or not I agree with her, I enjoyed reading about her opinions and struggles. The book was very well constructed and a fast read. With that in mind, I'd recommend it, though it may drive some empowered, non-trauma-based multiples crazy.




5. This book was hard for me to put down. I was so interested in finding out if Jane Phillips had come to any peace with her disorder, and how she went about doing that. The book focuses on the process of dealing with MPD, rather than the traumatic events which caused her to have MPD.

   I have a lot of compassion for people living with MPD after reading her book. I don't feel like I understand the disorder, but the book is filled with amazing insights.

   Thank you for being brave enough to publish such a personal experience.

4 comments about C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings.

1. Having regarded "Sociological Imagination" one of the few most exciting books written in the field, this one greatly disappointed me.



2. No one has written with more verve and authority about the awesome and frightening capabilities of man than the late C. Wright Mills, a prominent and controversial sociologist who wrote such memorable tomes as "White Collar", an exploration of the emerging American Middle class in the early 1950s, and The Power Elite", a provocative examination of the nature of power, privilege, and status in the United States, and how each of these three critical elements of power and property in this country are irrevocably connected to each other. At last look, both books were still in print and are still used in both undergraduate and graduate sociology courses throughout the world. After fifty years, that in and of itself is powerful testimony to his enduring value as a scholar and an original thinker.

   Here Mills focuses memorably on the qualities and uses of the sociological perspective in modern life, how such a scientifically based way of looking at, interpreting, and interacting with the larger world invests its user with a better, more accurate, and quite instrumental picture of what is happening meaningfully around him. For Mills, the key to understanding the value in such a perspective is in appreciating that one can only understand the motives, behavior, and actions of others by locating them within a wider and more meaningful context that connects their personal biographies with the large social circumstances that surround, direct, and propel them at any given historical moment. For Mills, for example, trying to understand the reasoning behind the sometimes desperate actions of Jews in Nazi Germany without appreciating the horrifyingly unique existential circumstances they found themselves in is hopelessly anachronistic and limited.

   On the other hand, one invested with such an appreciation for how biography and history interact to create the meaningful social circumstances of any situation finds himself better able to understand the fact that when in a country of one hundred million employed, one man's singular lack of employment might be due to his persoanl deficiencies or lack of a work ethic, and be laid at his feet as a personal trouble, it is also true that when twenty million individuals out of that one hundred million figure suddenly find themselves so disposed and unemployed, that situation is due to something beyond the control of those many individuals and is best described in socioeconomic terms as a social problem to be laid at the feet of the government and industry to resolve. To Mills, it is critical to understand the inherant differences between personal troubles on the one hand, which an individual has the responsibity to resolve and overcome, and social ills, which are beyond both his ken or control. Indeed, according to Mills, increasingly in the 20th century one finds himself trapped by social circumstance into dilemmas he is absolutely unable to resolve without significant help from the wider social community.

   Thus, for both psychological as well as social reasons, a person using the sociological perspective, or invested with what he called the "sociological imagination", is more able to think and act critically in accordance with the evidence both outside his door and beyond himself. Fifty years later, such a recognition of "what's what" and "who's who" based on the ability to judge the information within the social environment is as valuable as ever. This is a wonderful book, written in a very accessible and entertaining style, meant both for an intellectual audience and for the scholastic community as well. While it may not be for "everyman", any person wanting to better understand and more fully appreciate how individual biography and social history meaningfully interact to create the realities we live in will enjoy and appreciate this legendary sociological critique and invitation to the pleasures of a sociological perspective by one of its most remarkable proponents some half century ago.




3. A customer review on this site states that the editors have changed the word "men" to "people" in the letters. As the publisher, we would like to place this statement in its proper context.

   The unmarked edits only occurred in the Tovarich letters, those that were written to an imaginary Russian correspondent. Mills "made it clear [to his agent] that he wanted the Tovarich writings to be edited before they were published . . . his marginal comments included these instructions: 'very good, use it,' 'can't use this,' 'cut somewhat.'" And so, unlike for the rest of the letters, the editors "did not mark deletions with ellipses and occasionally changed the location of paragraphs, shortened a heading, or relaced a heading with a phrase that Mills had written in the text. Although we usually left the original references to men, boys, women, and girls in these essays, we occasionally changed 'men' to 'people.'"

   In the rest of the letters, the only editorial changes were spelling corrections and occasional deletions (the latter are always marked with brackets).




4. I have been eagerly awating the publication of these glimpses into Mills' 'personal' life. The book is organized, for the most part, chronologically. Its contents are mostly letters written by this most influental radical intellectuall of the cold war period. The letters (and autobiographical writings disguised as letters) reveal Mills to be as intense, focused, and dedicated to his social analysis as I, a student of his work, have imagined him to be. The writings are beautifully composed; Mills was indeed both a scientist AND an artist. His musings are inspiring for any student, scholar, or critical minded person who wants an insight into Mills "private" reflections. This book could also serve as a wonderful guide to a study of Mills' life-work, as we are given insight into his concerns and struggles during his writing process. I do have a complaint...his daughters, who have no doubt taken painstaking efforts to compose this work, have been so bold as to alter the language of his personal writings... "we occasionally changed 'men' to 'people'" (p. xiv). I think we are wise enough to realize that Mills language is a reflection of the social and historical context in which he lived...Regardless, we are lucky to have this invaluable resource that provides endless reflections into the life and though of C. Wright Mills. END

1 comments about Hunting with the Heart.

1. A one-time professor of psychology at the University of Cape Town, Saayman has combined the story of his study of baboons in the bushveld and whales off the Southern Cape coast with Jungian interpretations of the human condition, his personal life including a painful divorce with the sort of out-of-body experiences that are commonly known as astral travel, and South African historical events with indigenous cosmology.
   He comes closest to Laurens van der Post, also a Jungian, in his search for the mystical in all aspects of life.
   It is a particularly courageous book for a scientist to write, with its paranormal descriptions written with disarming honesty but also with a trained researcher's observations and recall. Saayman was no doubt aware that many of his conclusions would be dismissed by some conventionally- minded members of the academic community, but that has not stopped him from being true to his own vision.
   Other professors of analytical psychology and social science in Britain, Canada and South Africa, more open to Saayman's subjective approach, have recognized in this autobiography a genuine attempt to seek the cohesion that links everybody and everything at a spiritual level.