My Book Reviews

Review of All Hell Let Loose: The World At War 1939 - 1945 by Max Hastings Harper Press, 2011 My well-worn copy of this book I have long been fascinated with why human beings of one nation make war on another. Another lifelong preoccupation has been what motivates some of our kind to dominate and subjugate others. As individuals we are complex creatures, and as groups or nations we are equally complicated, if not more so.  The intertwining evils of hate and its concomitant violent consequences have cast ominous shadows over human cultures since the dawn of civilisation.  Max Hastings' 750 page tome is an amazingly comprehensive account of the Second World War that is based chiefly on thousands of individual accounts from all nations involved in that dreadful cataclysm that befell humankind between the years 1939 and 1945. In short, what we get in Hastings' brilliant and comprehensive tome is a "worm's eye" of the greatest tragedy that befell humankin...

Some Literature Dealing with Moral Evil and the Suffering Resulting Therefrom A Moral History of the Twentieth Century . Jonathan Glover London: Pimlico, 2001. For my fuller review of this book see  HERE Sunday Times Culture   S upplement of November 4, 2007 One Soldier's War in Chechnya, Arkady Babchenko, November, 2007 Jesus says many wise things which have become timeless truisms.  One is "the poor you will always have with you."  One could almost hear him averring the truth of another such saying as   "wars you will always have with you."   One need not be a historian or even a tolerably good politician to realise the truth of this latter contention.  A casual glance at the news in any medium will convince you of the endurance of war, of its seeming endlessness.  I shall start this post (quasi-review) with a few quotations from real-life witnesses of the horror of war.  Once again, one of my quotes comes from Jona...

The Devil’s Disciples: The Lives and Times of Hitler’s Inner Circle , Anthony Read   (Pimlico, 2004) I have already written in these pages that it would seem likely that my fascination with the topic of evil began with my viewing of the wonderful 1970s series called   The World at War ,   an excellent documentary series in 26 parts on World War 2 . It was narrated by the famous actor   Sir Laurence Olivier   and directed by at least six different directors and was a marvellous collaborative exercise between the   BBC and The Imperial War Museum . The list of those interviewed was enormous and so this series of documentaries is a magnum opus of historical research. The newsreel was moving and all too real, while the episode dealing with the evil of the concentration camps was possibly far too disturbing and had a lasting effect on my young mind. I was then 15 years old and was bowled over by the depths of man’s depravity and the extent of his inhumanit...

Ingrid Bacce, The Art of Effortless Living. New York: A Perigree Book, 2002 Years ago I read Ingrid Bacci’s book   The Art of Effortless Living .   As I type I’m aware of the unique power of the imagination – of what’s often termed visualisation.    Points that stick in my mind from that book are – the need to practise receptivity to the world around us by being awake and aware and open to experiencing it in all its wonders which are literally under our noses, to use a rather stupid cliché.  Smell the grass if you have no roses.  Breathe in the air and really experience it.    As she says, and I agree wholeheartedly with her, “receptivity is about letting go of planning and forcing, allowing ourselves instead to be guided.” (p. 251).   I’ve always loved the phrase “to go with the flow.”  This captures for me the miracle of life.  There’s nothing passive in this approach to lif...

The Integrity of the Personality.   Published January 15th 1992 by Ballantine Books (first published 1960) An analogy   for self-development,  I think, would be that of doing a rather complex   jigsaw puzzle . All the pieces are there intermingled and pattern-less and our project for life is to put the picture together. Working with this analogy, I think many of us only succeed to a limited extent in getting a full picture of who we are or of what our project in life is. I suppose the more mentally ill among us, or the less mentally whole or the less mentally integrated among us have the pieces scattered all over the place. I believe also, that it should be axiomatic that no one ever gets the whole jigsaw done as that implies complete integration. Dr. Anthony Storr I have referred to my favourite psychiatrist in these pages before – that is the late great Dr. Anthony Storr .    Anyway, one of my favourite books by Storr is The Integ...

To Have or To Be by Dr Erich Fromm (1976) I remember years ago reading the famous psychoanalyst   Erich Fromm's   book called   To Have or to Be (1976, 1979).   I was at   Mater Dei Institute of Education  at the time and   Fromm's   distinction had a great impact on me as a young man and has stayed with me since.  In this book, he argues that there exist two ways of being that are competing for 'the spirit of mankind' - having and being. The having mode looks to things and material possessions and is based on aggression and greed. The being mode is rooted in love and is concerned with shared experience and productive activity. Part one of the book deals with understanding the difference between having and being; part two with analysing the fundamental differences between the two modes, while part three deals with the new man and the new society.  Fromm was influenced by many strands of study from as diverse fields ...