November 2013

Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir, SPIRIT MATTERS - Reaching for the Divine

Most autobiographies cover the main events of a life with the reader often left with only glimpses of the inner life of the author. Carl Jung’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung) autobiographical  Memories, Dreams, Reflections (first English translation 1963), focuses on the great psychologist’s spiritual and intellectual awakenings. The descriptions of his visions, dreams and fantasies, which he considered his […]

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In Search of Memory

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

This is Eric Kandel’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Kandel) account of how his personal quest to understand memory intersected with the emergence of a new science. In Search of Memory relates the astonishing story of how four different and distinct disciplines – behaviourist psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology – converged into a powerful new science of mind. Through

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Consider the Lilies by Iain Crichton Smith

LITERARY BENT - Writing at its best, SCOTTISH INTEREST

The Highland Clearances, occurring roughly between 1792 and the 1850s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances), was one of the cruellest episodes in Scotland’s history. In Consider the Lilies (1968) Iain Crichton Smith (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Crichton_Smith) captures its impact through the thoughts and memories of old Mrs Scott who has lived all her life within the narrow confines of her community. Alone and bewildered by the demands

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Garnethill

CRIMINALLY MINDED - Tales of the behaviourally challenged, FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times, SCOTTISH INTEREST

Denise Mina (http://www.denisemina.co.uk/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Mina) treats us to a grisly Glasgow crime novel in Garnethill.  Maureen O’Donnell wasn’t born lucky. A psychiatric patient and survivor of sexual abuse, she’s stuck in a dead-end job and a secretive relationship with Douglas, a shady therapist. Her few comforts are making up stories to tell her psychiatrist, the company of

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The Ancestor’s Tale

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Richard Dawkins’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins and http://www.richarddawkins.net/) 2004 popular science book, The Ancestor’s Tale, is loosely modelled on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Instead of pilgrims journeying to Canterbury, Dawkins’ protagonists are living species, journeying back through evolutionary time. In real time, individual species diverged and speciated. But in the backwards time of The Ancestor’s Tale, separate species start the

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Why Beauty Is Truth

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

At the heart of relativity theory, quantum mechanics, string theory, and much of modern cosmology lies one concept: symmetry. In Why Beauty Is Truth, world-famous mathematician Ian Stewart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stewart_(mathematician)) narrates the history of the emergence of this remarkable area of study. He introduces us to such characters as the Renaissance Italian genius, rogue, scholar, and gambler Girolamo

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