My Book Reviews

My copy of this book Some weeks ago I reviewed a memoir in these pages, viz.,  Staring at Lakes.  Here, I wish to review another memoir, this time one by Paul Auster called Winter Journal  (Faber & Faber, 2012).  It differs greatly from that of Michael Harding.  Harding's work is one which is centered on the Self as an ontological reality as encountered in meditation, in deep philosophical thinking and in that exacting way, I know only too well, of the person who suffers from clinical depression.  Auster's work is not as intense at all as its guiding force is that of a phenomenological exploration of what it means to be a human being in today's modern world.  I was intrigued by Auster's approach which I deem one of remarkably sharp observation. Like every other human being, mortality rears its ugly head for this author in this wonderfully honest book.  We meet him in its pages as an embodied self, whereas in Harding's work we meet th...

I have already reviewed a book by Robert A. Johnson, viz., Owning Your Own Shadow  in this blog before  here . This time I wish to review another one from Dr. Johnson's pen, namely Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth , HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins, 1989. My copy of this little classic Robert A. Johnson is an internationally recognized Jungian analyst, lecturer and author who is now in his early nineties.  Dr. Johnson is to be praised for popularizing the work of Professor Carl Gustav Jung in the United States of America especially, but also much more widely around the world.  He is universally lauded for the accessibility of his texts and lectures to the man and woman in the street.  He studied at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich where Jung's wife Emma was his main analyst.  He also steeped himself in both Eastern and Western mysticism, the former by dialogue with  Jiddu Krishnamurti  (1895...

When I'm feeling somewhat low, or perhaps empty or lacking in inspiration even, it is then that I instinctively look to poetry for something uplifting, fulfilling or inspiring - even healing, if possible.  As I write these notes here, a friend of mine is preparing a collection of my poems in the Irish language for publication.  It took me best part of a week to sift through a couple of hundred poems I had written in Gaeilge to pick out around fifty for a collection to send on to him. Doing that was literally a labour of love and a great sustenance for my soul.  Not that I'm being egotistical here as real poetry, or more correctly the making of poems, has more to do with soul than with ego.  However, as I had to read them thoroughly to pick some out, the reader will forgive me some little self-obsession, at least momentarily.  Further, I was overcome with both emotion and inspiration looking back at my spiritual path over the past twenty years as revealed in th...

Staring at Lakes: A memoir of Love, Melancholy and Magical Thinking (Hachette Books, Ireland, 2013) by Michael Harding. My copy of Harding's book Harding is an outstanding Irish author, playwright, novelist and actor who writes a column in The Irish Times .  It is not surprising at all that this memoir won the non-fiction book of the year at the Irish Book Awards, 2013. If I were asked for a comparable book in the memoir line here in Ireland, I should have to point to Nuala O'Faolain's equally moving   Are You Somebody? : The accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1996). Both books are written with such a white-hot honesty that the searing truth burns into the page and keeps the reader gripped in such an intensity that one simply does not want to put the book down until one is finished.  I read Harding's book in one sitting, just like I did O'Faolain's book.  In existential terms, one is caught by the sheer authe...

Sustaining a Theme 2 My last post finished with a review of David Maraniss's biography of William Jefferson Clinton, a fairly objective account by an unauthorized biographer that concluded with his declaration that he would run for President in October 1991 at the end of a 32 minute speech at The Old State House in Little Rock, Arkansas.  Maraniss writes wonderfully clear prose as one would expect from a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.  In one of his concluding paragraphs he writes: His mother was there to hear him say those words.  She had been waiting to hear them since he was a boy.  She was the one who taught him how to block things out and to keep going through tough times.  She gave him his perseverance and his optimism.  Now she was determined to play out one final act of will.  Four months earlier her doctor had told her that her breast cancer had spread and that she was dying.  She had not told her son.  She hoped not to te...

Sustaining a Theme 1 My copies of these two books Now that I have reviewed several books on JFK and his brother Bobby, I suppose it would be no surprise if I were to review several books about and by President William Jefferson Clinton.  I also got to listen to this great American leader in College Green on December 1, 1995 where 80, 000 people listened attentively and with occasional cheers as he addressed the citizens of Dublin from a platform outside the Bank of Ireland, that is the old parliament building directly opposite Trinity College.  The link for this writer here is that in June 1963 William Jefferson Clinton as a 17 year old student (when he had been elected as the Arkansas representative to the American Legion's Boys State) met his hero President John F. Kennedy who was also, as I have stated in the post immediately before this one, an Irish hero, on a par in the then Ireland of the early 1960s with the Pope in Rome. There is even a famous photograph of t...

Passion Before I indicate the books that I wish to review here let me say some brief words on the topic of passion.  It has long been my belief that love or desire or passion for one's career counts for a lot.  I had wanted to become a teacher since I was a young boy of ten.  Why? Quite simply, because I was awe-struck by the ability to teach of an old teacher near his retirement.  This man was still enthusiastic and still interested in his students after many years of teaching. Indeed, I remember telling my mother that I wished to be a teacher like Mr. Murray because I had learnt so much from him with such a singular ease.  It was not solely down to me at all, though I was a good student.  There was something about Mr Murray that I intuitively admired, and looking back at it after all these years (46 to be precise), that one thing was his passion for and his commitment to or enthusiasm for his job. Some people write off this quality far too easily i...