Category: Reviews

  • Book Review: Consciousness in Jung and Patañjali

    Introduction Leanne Whitney spent a decade and a half studying the work of Carl Jung and Patañjali. Whitney shares her research findings in Consciousness in Jung and Patañjali. It’s an interesting book. Comparing the work of Jung and Patañjali “offers a rich source of deep discussion in relation to the nature of consciousness, the reality…

  • Book Review: The Dawn of Everything

    David Graeber and David Wengrow spent ten years writing The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Everything. The book is based on a dialogue between them about human history. The breakthrough came when they moved away from European thinkers and focused on the perspectives of indigenous thinkers. The prevalent view of history has almost…

  • Book Review: Gentle Action

    Introduction Gentle Action: Bringing Creative Change to a Turbulent World by F. David Peat is a book about moving from policies, plans and imposed solutions to more intelligent and harmonious action that evolves out of the context itself.1 This involves creative suspension of action, with the aim of developing a clearer perception of the situation,…

  • Book Review: LSD and the Mind of the Universe

    LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven by Christopher Bache is a book which has two titles. The outer title, LSD and the Mind of the Universe, describes what the book is about. The inner title, Diamonds from Heaven, refers to the “Diamond Light” at “the center of the mind of the…

  • Bokrecension: Du stolta, du fria

    Du stolta, du fria: Om svenskarna, Sverigebilden och folkhälsopatriotismen av Gina Gustavsson är en bok om det Sverige som blottades när coronapandemin svepte över landet. Gina Gustavsson är docent i statskunskap vid Uppsala universitet och fristående kolumnist i Dagens Nyheter. Detta är en recension av Gina Gustavssons bok. Låt mig klargöra redan från början att…

  • Book Review: Maverick

    Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler is an international bestseller which was first published in 1993. This is a review of the edition from 1999. Ricardo Semler writes in the new introduction that Maverick is “a reminder that age-old truths about human nature, respect and integrity can be…

  • Book Review: Clever Digs

    Jenny Quillien identifies patterns that enable thought in her book Clever Digs: How Workspaces Can Enable Thought. Quillien focuses on thinking, but doesn’t address spaces for aliveness (Christopher Alexander’s “quality without a name“). I assume that places that support a sense of aliveness also are good for thinking — especially creative thinking. Patterns can be…

  • Book Review: Biopoetics

    Biopoetics: Towards an Existential Ecology by Andreas Weber connects our human experience with a scientific understanding of life. A major limitation of conventional scientific objectivity is the exclusion of the first-person subjective perspective. Rational thinking has omitted the rationality of the living body. Andreas Weber proposes an existential poetics for living systems: 1) Perception and…

  • Book Review: Biology of Wonder

    Andreas Weber writes in Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science that the more technology allows us to study life, the stronger the evidence of life’s complexity and intelligence becomes. For two hundred years, biology made no major efforts to answer what life really is. Most biologists assumed organisms to be tiny…

  • Book Review: Matter and Desire

    Andreas Weber pursues an ambitious goal with Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology. He investigates the principles of reality that we experience and are part of through a science of the heart. It became clear to Weber that we need to completely rethink how we understand life and its significance. It also means that we…