Reviews

Summary A collaborative autobiography by the man the myth the legend C.G. Jung. As an additional note, after reading this, I then listened to one of the “Very short introduction” books on Jung which was largely unnecessary after reading this book except that it put a little more meat on the bones of his theories. Thoughts It is difficult to review books sometimes because books have so many different uses. Some books are for fun, some are works of art, others are descriptive. So should you rate on how much you enjoyed a book? How well it was written? I think I prefer to review a book on how well it did what it set out to do, and this book did really well. Jung’s memory of his life is incredible. From his ability to recall a dream he had when he was three, to his structured accounts of his various travels, one thing this book did was made me realize how little of my life I could retell if I was forced to. There is no way I could discuss all the ideas this book brought up, so I’ll just give a few impressions. The first one is that if Jung had been born a couple hundred years early, or in a different part of the world, he most definitely would have become a shaman. His unique psyche revealed things to him that I think most people would never be able to experience. The second thing I noticed was that the parallels between priests and psychologists also include the fact that when it comes to both, your mileage may vary. When it comes to allowing myself to be psychoanalyzed, it seems like I would want an extended character reference…. an autobiography perhaps? People/C.G. Jung ...

This was fun. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Melville does a great job of giving you a sense of place and feeling. This book made me want to be a sailor, maybe i’ll buy a sailor outfit at least. Who knows. It exposes various human foibles, like Quaker whalers who are fundamentally anti violence while spending large portions of their time inflicting violence on the largest creature on earth or the animal rights person who writes their edicts in the light of a whale oil lamp. The book teaches its reader a lot about the anatomy of a whale and engenders a respect for an animal and then proceeds to graphically describe the exciting whale hunt that ultimately causes much pain and suffering to the animal you just learned about. I wonder if the point is that we are all walking contradictions in our own way? Maybe we need to give each other some slack…Who knows either way great book.

Written by Jordan Peterson’s daddy himself this book was really quite enjoyable. I preferred it over some of the books I’ve read from Freud. It is a collection of 11 essays that cover various topics from dreams to metaphysics. Opening the book, the reader is asked to make two assumptions. Assumption one, the subconscious exists. While this doesn’t seem like a big deal in a post Freud world (which Jung is post Freud) there is still some debate. The second assumption is that there exists in humans a soul. This is still up for heated debate today, but if you accept these two assumptions daddy Jung takes you on a ride, explaining his approach to psychoanalysis, modern man vs primitive man and the overlap between the two. The waning effectiveness of the church to treat psychoses due to the approach of the education system. This is one of those books like a C.S Lewis book where everything he says just makes sense. Made for an enjoyable read but I also know whenever I am feeling that comfortable with what someone is saying it means that I have not been educated enough in contra-ideas. Overall, I’d highly recommend, it’s given me much to think about and I will definitely be returning to re-read later on. ...

Summary The story is told by Howard W. Campbell, a convicted Nazi propagandist, who is awaiting trial in an Israeli prison. He writes a type of memoir about his own life and experiences. Campbell grows up in Nazi Germany, becoming the “voice” of Goebbels’ Propaganda ministry. What the Nazis don’t know is that shortly before the war, Campbell had been contacted by an American spymaster. The speeches Campbell made were encoded with information for allied intelligence agencies. Thanks to this service, American intelligence agents allow him to escape Germany and live an anonymous life in New York. His past will continue to haunt him, and through a series of twists and coincidences, his will to live is crushed, which leads him to turn himself in to the Israeli authorities to stand trial for his crimes. ...

After the first few paragraphs of this book, I was hooked. Amazing writing, beautiful story telling. Mrs. Dalloway follows the events of a random day in June in post WW1 England. There are unmistakable parallels between this and Joyce’s Ulysses, the main difference being that this was enjoyable to read while the other was decidedly not. We get to hear the stream of consciousness of many characters through which we are painted a picture of people, relationships, and events from multiple perspectives. To me the main theme of the book was time and society. We jump forward and backward in the day’s events, but the connecting string is the sound of Big Ben ticking away the hours. In some ways it seems to anchor the experiences, cutting short thoughts, connecting storylines, signaling the inevitable flow of things. The only thing more ever-present than time is society. One of my favorite characters is a man suffering from severe PTSD after losing a friend in the war. He is eventually driven mad, his remarks on “human nature” and its inability to put up with difference were very interesting and I feel like a key, albeit extreme version of what several other characters were experiencing. Identity is often looked at individualistically, but I think more and more that it only exists in relation. It is a nexus of desires comprised of many conflicting aspects, even within our own minds. This is shown nowhere more clearly than with the eponymous Mrs. Dalloway. This book was a great experience. Virginia Woolf ...

At times illuminating, frustrating, thought provoking, unrelatable Roland Barthes has a different understanding of what myth is than most. He feels as if no one is intentionally creating myths anymore but they are being creating all the same via social values. This book is broken into two parts the first part is a collection of essays he wrote where he analyses various events and things in the modern day and explains the modern myth that is attached to them. This branch of study is I guess called semiology, basically it looks at things in the world and looks for things that carry more meaning than their essence. For example, he breaks down different portraits styles of French politicians to explain why they were cropped just so, looked in such and such a direction, wore just such a suit etc. etc. etc. All choices deliberately made to communicate more than just happenstance random choice but instead a specific meaning. He saw myth as an organizational tool used to maintain and justify a given social order. As indicated in this quote: ...

Summary Antoine Roquentin, an isolated aspiring biographer, inhabits Bouville (mud town) like a ghost. “Nausea” by Sartre is not so much a story as it is an attempt to let the reader have an experience. Roquentin’s alienation provides the space to observe, producing the typical results of social critique. Yet, he goes beyond this to grapple with the existence of things in general. Thoughts This book will have a very hit-or-miss reception among readers. It can be easily dismissed as another case of a melancholic Frenchman who needs to spend more time in the sun. When I picture Antoine, he is quite pale, so those readers would probably be correct. However, for my friends who don’t know when to stop asking questions, this book will give you a few more. ...

Summary Llewelyn Moss, a small town welder, stumbles on a briefcase full of cash in the middle of the desert. Taking the briefcase triggers a series of events that forever links the fates of him, an aging sheriff, and a hitman. Thoughts This is the third Cormac McCarthy book I’ve read this year and it may be my favorite. He wrote it a year before The Road, you can see the two stories as connected in an interesting way, but more on that later. This book is one of McCarthy’s least “fancy” book, you aren’t going to get much of his unique pacing or Hemingway-esque prose that was prominent in his border trilogy. For some, this is a loss; for others, it’s a welcome relief. Llewelyn Moss, quickly revealed to be out of his depth, knows this yet persistently tries to convince himself and others of his capability. Sheriff Bell is of course, one of the men that are too old for this country, whenever the book switches to his perspective we are usually met with a memory or utter consternation at the direction the world seems to be heading. Bell is a sheriff that everyone would consider to be an “old timer”, but he secretly knows he is not. He’s got all the common sense of the older generation but can’t manage to have the same beliefs, and this bothers him to no end. Bell’s wife acts like Dante’s Beatrice, a guide and anchor to life that he would be completely lost without. The antagonist, Anton Chigurh, a representation of fate, the unyielding code, and the inevitable end, seamlessly weaves in and out of the narrative. He embodies the universe, one that defies reasoning through its own inexorable logic. ...

Summary This book follows the careers of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, focusing on the second half of FDR’s administration from 1940 to 1945. By this time, Franklin had been the U.S. President for nearly two full terms. During those two terms, he had transformed the federal government to an almost unrecognizable extent, implementing many policies we now take for granted, like Social Security, the FDIC, the SEC, and the 40-hour workweek. These policies were part of a larger platform known as the “New Deal,” which was essentially a labor reform agenda that emerged during the Great Depression. ...

In 1864, Russia and the Western world was experiencing a philosophical reversal with reverberations that can still be felt almost two hundred years later. One by one “unquestionable” truths were being placed in the dust bin by a cold rationality. The attack on humanity’s placement of itself in the universe started over three hundred years earlier, when a polymath named Copernicus rediscovered the forgotten truth that we are not the center of the universe. Ever since then, the more scientific details that are catalogued about the world, the further man is pushed from that once prized and secure position. There are two main ideas that the underground man (UM) simultaneously seems to prove by his actions and disapprove of by his words. First is man as nature, the second is man as automata, and by extension nature as automata. It had only been five years since Charles Darwin had written ‘On the Origin of Species’ and already Dostoyevsky has incorporated his theory and worked out what he sees as its possible ramifications. Chiefly that of an alienated human that is horrified to look in the mirror and see no-thing looking back. In an opening note to the book Dostoevsky makes clear that the UM is an inevitable product of the spread of these two ideologies. The book opens with the memorable… ...