In the 1940s, a very well educated psychoanalyst, Immaneul Velikovsky, from his own studies of the human mind, felt these ancient myths weren’t 100% fictional after all. They had some similarity to what he was hearing from some of his patients who had suffered from overpowering fear. He studied and compared myths from cultures all over the world, Middle East, Mediterranean, Chinese, Mayan, Aztec, Inca, and others. They all seem to describe the same events. Velikovsky, therefore, thought the planetary orbits had been disturbed during historical times, causing havoc on earth and frightening people who, not knowing better, thought the planets were gods.
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A review of Dead Piano by Henry Van Dyke
Throughout Dead Piano, there is a carefully evoked atmosphere, with recognizable and believable characters, but also strong farcical elements rooted in sudden reversals of conversational tone, with small matters becoming large, and accidents happening, and the establishment and/or subversion of…
The Betrayal of a Beautiful Man: Love and Death in Paris in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
Giovanni’s Room, a book featuring a man who has chosen not to be free, might be considered James Baldwin’s declaration of independence: the book refuses to accept the usual boundaries of nationality, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality, turning these into open…
Interview with Dee Rimbaud
The author of Dropping Ecstasy with the Angels talks about the origins of the chapbook, spiritual healing, the drug ecstasy, how he chose which poems to include, the changes in his work over the years, the value of poetry, his blog, his many other projects, multimedia, and much more.
A review of Dropping Ecstasy With the Angels by Dee Rimbaud
This is not a lighthearted read. There are moments of terrible pain, of lonely emptiness, of insane decadence which will upset the prudish, and of spiritual crises.Dropping Ecstasy with the Angels is a serious and important collection with poems that are…
review of Write a Book on Anything in 28 Days or Less by Nick Daws
As an outline and motivational guide for writing a first draft, the course delivers reasonable value. However, a first draft is still a long way off the kind of work that needs to be written in order to find a…
A review of The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
As a distopia, the story effectively conveys the possibility that history could easily have been different, at the same time highlighting the delicacy of the structure of our current democracy–one that could change with little warning. There is plenty of…
A review of Waiting for Kate Bush by John Mendelssohn
Waiting for Kate Bush is a funny, fast-paced read. The characters are full of interesting Dickensian qualities, quirky parallels, and twists which tease out the theme—that nothing is quite what it seems. Fame is a fleeting and strange thing which…
A review of Wrong About Japan by Peter Carey
As one would expect from an author who can write well about anything, the book is full of the kind of detail which makes for good travel writing: setting, character, anecdote, and scenery descriptions, but this is much more than…
A review of The Turning by Tim Winton
The Turning often makes for painful reading, as we are drawn deeply into the heart of these stunted, unhappy, and sometimes doomed lives, but Winton’s prose is transcendent. Taken together, these stories create their own turning, a sense that life…