The Hidden Messages in Water Review

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(More customer reviews)Like many others, I became aware of this book through the excellent film "What the Bleep?" and had high expectations for the message. The book started off interestingly enough, but as it went on, I became more and more put off by Emoto's lack of scientific perspective, even as he was claiming to be performing "research."
To be clear, I am very open minded and actively seek out cutting-edge ideas that push the envelope of our concepts of 'reality.' However, if a photo is shown of an ice crystal that purportedly got its shape from a prayer or a phrase or a song, a rational thinking person wants to know, "Out of a billion crystals that may have formed at that instant, how representative (or *subjectively selective*) is that photo that is being shown of the entire population of the crystals in the mix?" Careful statistical evaluations would be necessary to establish any solid basis for Emoto's theses. Yet no hard data such as this exists in this book. I am open to these ideas, even want to believe in them, but, where's the beef?
After viewing the photos and Emoto's captions describing them, it would be hard for an objective person --regardless of their level of open-mindedness and optimism-- to not see that his interpretations are extemely subjective and dubious. Although I was trying to hang with him, he really lost me at the point where he showed a photo of a crystal from water that had been shown a picture of a crop circle and told us the crystal looked like a UFO. (To be fair, I was fascinated by the four crystal photos of Vivaldi's Four Seasons - they seemed to fit the seasons very well.)
There's 'good' new age, and there's 'bad' new age; it was very disappointing that this book drifted into the latter. I am still open to the idea that H2O may have interesting messages; Emoto just fundamentally fails to deliver. It received two stars because it is a nicely published book, and it did stimulate me to fantisize that, applying REAL scientific research, these ideas may lead to something interesting ... someday.

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This book has the potential to profoundly transform your world view. Using high-speed photography, Dr. Masaru Emoto discovered that crystals formed in frozen water reveal changes when specific, concentrated thoughts are directed toward them. He found that water from clear springs and water that has been exposed to loving words shows brilliant, complex, and colorful snowflake patterns. In contrast, polluted water, or water exposed to negative thoughts, forms incomplete, asymmetrical patterns with dull colors. The implications of this research create a new awareness of how we can positively impact the earth and our personal health.

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Rumi Birdsong: Fifty-Three Short Poems Review

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(More customer reviews)Birdsong contains 53 short poems that are reworkings of the translation by A. J. Arberry, a major scholar of Sufism.
Not all of the poems have any direct relationship to birds, rather the birdsong of the title refers to a common metaphor in mystic traditions e.g. The Conference of the Birds, a major Sufi work.
Barks, as usual, provides excellent translations; he truly makes the poetry of Rumi accessible to the average reader (as compared to some scholarly translations that are precise but no longer poetry or that require technical vocabulary).
His selection of poems is also excellent; they are poems that encourage meditative thought. An example: "Stars burn clear / all night till dawn. / Do that yourself, and a spring / will rise in the dark with water / your deepest thirst is for. "

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The Alchemist Review

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(More customer reviews)Yes, much of what negative reviewers of this book have to say is true: the writing is blunt and simple, the characters lack depth and complexity, it is quite male-focused in its subject matter and language, it has a bunch of quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo, and so on. This book should not be put on the list of great literature for the ages. There are doubtless many novels that cover subject matter from this book far more artfully. As I read the book, I was aware of its hokeyness and lack of redeeming literary qualities. I am, in fact, usually the first person to criticize books that read like this.
And yet, I have to say - and I feel a bit sheepish about this - that I found it meaningful, even profound at times. How can I say this, given my criticisms? First of all, unlike many reviewers, I did not approach this book with great expectations. No one told me that this was Shakespeare or Tolstoy; I had never even heard of it until it was recommended to me recently. And by the end of page 2, I had adjusted my expectations further. This clearly was not going to be winning the Booker prize.
But I found the book moving in its simple way. The characters deliver their statements without subtlety, but subtlety is more a literary virtue than a philosophical one. In fact, I essentially came to view this work as a life philosophy expressed as a fable, so I didn't particularly mind that its messages were not buried far beneath the surface.
Are those messages novel? No, but what of it? Novelists have been recycling themes for centuries, becuase many themes are of enduring interest and relevance. The point is, the messages are worthwhile and deserving of consideration. They are simple, but I think that simplicity is itself one of the central themes of the book: that life is not that complicated when one follows one's dreams honestly and passionately, or as the book says, "with love and purpose." And yet the book reminds us that it is very easy to give up dreams and abandon one's passion.
I have to disagree with one often-mentioned criticism of the book, namely, that it advocates pure materialism. That is, in my opinion, a serious misinterpretation. The book is written in the style of a fable, and therefore the goals people strive for are the typical gold-and-buried-treasure stuff. But I think one would have to misread the book quite severely to think that it is advocating material gain. The book is not at all about the specific goals that the protagonist pursues. It is about the importance of wanting something urgently and how the wanting seems to reorient the universe in harmony with that goal (just as a magnetic field can reorder the particles around it), how genuine passion and enthusiasm are rewarded with success, how those who love us encourage us to pursue our goals, and how the act of reaching for goals - whatever they are, and whether or not ultimately reached - plunges us into a strong current that carries us to places that we can never expect or know when we embark. There is something here in common with the beliefs of the Romantics, in that much of the value of the goal is in the journey that it leads us on -- the experiences gained and the lessons learned.
It's not a fair criticism of the book, I think, to say that it doesn't tell us what happens when people's goals conflict with one another, or disclose that circumstances outside of our control often render us unable to reach our goals however sincerely we may pursue them. We don't need a book to tell us that. Anyone who has made it out of childhood knows that, and I have to believe that the author is well aware of this as well. I suspect that through his simple tale, he is trying to provide some kind of argument against the kind of cynicism or fear that the world can sometimes instill in us, and encourage us to keep diving into that "strong current" to see where it takes us.

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A Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin Review

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(More customer reviews)Collins has prepared a wonderful text for students of Church history, medieval theology, the Vulgate Bible, liturgical texts, etc. all of which require an understanding of Ecclesiastical Latin.
This text is formatted in such a way that the reader learns the language is a systematic fashion. In other words, each unit builds on the previous unit. The thorough student will master each unit before moving on to the next.
Moreover, everything anyone could ever want to know about the language is present in this text. For instance, kinds of sentences, nouns, verbs, adjectives and all their declensions, pronunciations, irregular and deponent verbs, etc., all are clearly and carefully covered in this text. As the student of this text reads and learns, Collins periodically places drills and sections called "notes" to quiz the reader on what was just covered. The text demonstrates an emphasis on vocabulary as well, has an English-Latin and Latin-English vocabulary section as well as a nice index on words and subjects.
This is probably the best overall text on Ecclesiastical Latin available, I highly recommend it!

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