My Book Reviews

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, New York: HarperCollins, 1992. All paths lead homeward…eventually. In the summer of 2006 many unknown others and I packed the Mahony Hall in the Helix Theatre at DCU to listen to the famous Tibetan Lama, Sogyal Rinpoche address us on Buddhism.  What a ray of hope was such teaching!  What a still point in the heart of the throbbing city!  It was great to see so many people of all ages and of all backgrounds there to sit at the master’s feet.  Sogyal Rinpoche is well known as a gifted international speaker on Tibetan Buddhism and is the author of the bestseller   The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying – a classic which has sold millions worldwide and is essentially an explication of and commentary on the Bardo Todol , the ancient Tibetan classic.  John Cleese has described this book thus: “One of the most helpful books I have ever read.”  I like this comment, made by one ...

Stephen J. Costello   The Irish Soul in Dialogue,   Liffey Press, 2001 (See  Liffey Press ) In this post, while I wish to review Dr Costello’s book, I will also examine briefly the importance of the questioning spirit, and ponder how healing this very spirit can be.  This book is the transcript of interviews the philosopher-author had with Irish cognoscenti on what they felt we might mean by the word “soul” in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century Ireland.  The author's compilation of names is eclectic, and it includes, among others, Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, monk/philosopher Mark Patrick Hederman O.S.B., novelist Roddy Doyle, and Ireland’s Cardinal Desmond Connell, long since retired. Each questioning involves, at an intimate level, a questing after something for nobody is completely at home in himself or his world. The personalities encountered in these pages, with their passions and prejudices, will inspire, interest and intrigue....

I have just finished reading a lovely and lively introduction to Jungian Psychology called   Jung and the Human Psyche   by   Dr. Mary Ann Mattoon   (Routledge, 2005). The author had a  diploma in Analytical Psychology from the C.G. Jung Institute of Zurich (Switzerland), awarded in 1965, and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1970. She was the National president of the College and University Division of the YWCA from 1946 until 1947 and became the first President and a lifetime member of the Minnesota Jung Association.  She died in 2006 at the age of 82. Jung and the Human Psyche is a superb and comprehensive introduction to the thought of Carl Gustave Jung and it explains in detail all the concepts we associate with him from the collective unconscious, the archetypes, the shadow and so on to individuation and so forth.  For anyone looking for a general and clear introduction to the thought and analytical practice of the famous...

A Small Classic of Modern Spirituality   I have recorded in these pages before that friends have recommended books for me to read. I have long had an interest in spirituality as has good friend of mine, Tom Gleeson, roughly my own age and a fellow teacher. I suppose we are more than friends – we are, in fact, kindred spirits. We have attended many courses on personal (both spiritual and psychological) development together. A small contemporary spiritual classic that I have just finished – called The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation – is one he lent me a few weeks back, but which I have just got around to finishing. It is a wonderfully simple, disarmingly simple, yet profound book. This book is 45 short pages in length and comprises two lectures delivered by Thomas Keating, the famous Trappist monk and scholar, at Harvard University in 1997 in a lecture series endowed by Harold M. Wit. Fr. Thomas Keating, O.C.S.O. was born in 1923 in New York City, ...

A Review of a Travel Adventure and an Insight into Suffering Ewan McGregor  and Charley Boorman's international bestseller  Long Way Round   (Time Warner Books, 2004)   I shall begin this post with a longish quotation which I deem apt to my previous and ever-preoccupied musings on the nature of evil.  I was just dipping in and out of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman's international bestseller  Long Way Round  (Time Warner Books, 2004)   - after all they have proved that it is possible to ride all the way around the world by motorbike.  Here is the relevant quotation: A few weeks later, we arrived at the first big river in Siberia.  It was too wide, too fast and too deep to cross on a motorbike.  There was a bridge, but it had collapsed.  I thought Charley would be itching to get ahead, impatient with the hold-up.  But he was in his element.  He knew that someone o...