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Book reviews for "Douglas,_Claire" sorted by average review score:

The Sunset Murders
Published in Hardcover by Pocket Star (1992)
Authors: Louise Farr and Claire Zion
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Very detailed, well written
I read this book a few years ago and I still wonder about Carol Bundy. She is the most pathetic person, she still wants to help Doug Clark even though he has tried to blame the murders on her. This book was very detailed, Farr did a very thourough job in describing all the details that true crime buffs love.

EXCELLENT
The Sunset Murders is an absolutely gripping story, very well written, and as far as I know the only book written about this case (to date).

At the center of the story is Carol Bundy, 37, on first glance appearing to be a typical Valley wife and mother of two small boys. Who leaves her abusive husband Grant, and moves into the seedy Valerio Gardens Complex. The manager, Jack Murray, a native Australian is also a lounge singer nicknamed the "Australian Cowboy" married with two children. His wife, Jeanette, is a beautiful, slim, leggy blond (and an ex-marine!). Carol on the other hand is rather plump & "matronly", with a large front, cropped mousy brown limp hair, and glasses with thick lenses, her doctor told her she's going blind.

Carol comes from a horrendous childhood, suffering abuse from both parents. The worst from her father. She has a very needy, clingy personality, and likes to be dominated by men.

After she moves into the complex, she latches onto Jack, saying she was sorry he was married, to which he responded "that's okay, I fool around."

Jack, according to his friends was "an *sshole..but a likeable *sshole." He's a womanizer and seems to have an insatiable sexual appetite, and often told tall tales, mostly to impress women.

The only good things he did for Carol, was to suggest she get another opinion about her eyes, the doctors revealed her sight could be restored with sugery. And he told her to contact a lawyer to get her share of the house where she lived with her husband (he was selling it), which she did, an amount of: $25,000. With which she bought gifts for Jack, that he happily accepted.

But another man would enter Carol's life, a man much more dangerous and sinister than Jack. His name was Doug Clark, 32, she met him at a club that Jack frequented in North Hollywood called "The Little Nashville Club" .

Doug was charming, slim and handsome with golden blond hair & blue eyes. And a hypnotic, soft voice. But he was also a cold blooded killer. He would introduce Carol to a world of sexual obsession and serial murder, where she would be his unlikely accomplice. And later she would commit murder of her own.

Later unable to fulfill Doug (and Jack), who by and by didn't want to sleep with Carol anymore, citing that she was "underwhelmingly attractive" she brought her 11 year old neighbor Theresa to meet him. Doug was enraptured with Theresa, a particulary spunky precocious little blond girl. Who neighbors would joke with by saying "You're 11 going on 40". Doug seemed to put her on a pedestal, lavishing her with gifts and they would often go cruising together! Later Carol actually went to a couselor with Theresa, to whom she revealed Theresa & Doug's relationship. The counselor asked Theresa if it bothered her, to which she replied "not really". So he told Carol if it didn't bother Theresa, then it wasn't his place to moralize!

And this is just a taste, there's so much more!
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The Sunset Murders is a facinating story, filled with some of the most oddest people and circumstances.
The book goes in depth into each person's history even some of the detectives on the case. Including some female detectives battling sexism in the workplace, from the males who think women are too inept to work homicide...Engrossing, never a dull moment!

Great research, but I wonder....
The book "The Sunset Murders" is certainly well-detailed and fact based. I applaud Farr for her eyes and ears used to bring this twisted story to life, and yes, she does not glamorize the killers, instead displaying them obviously as what they are in real life - sick and disgusting losers. Clark a grandiose, overblown ass and Bundy his oversexed ignorant slave. I just wondered, after reading the book, if there was one single person involved in the story from witnesses to cosp, that was pleasant or had any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Not the killers, mind you, but there had to be someone in law enforcement and investigating worth applauding. I didn't care for some of the presentations of the investigators. Five stars for research though. And I wonder - what has become of Carol's sons? Crime fans - read this book.


The Roasted Vegetable
Published in Paperback by Harvard Common Pr (2002)
Author: Andrea Chesman
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life of living in the ancient forest of Saddleback Mountain
Describing the Oregon Coast Range could be a rugged task, but author Jane Claire Dirks-Edmund takes a graceful approach.

She explores a life of living in the ancient forest of Saddleback Mountain, known today as Saddle Bag Mountain, on the Van Duzer Corridor in Lincoln County. Covering a 60 year segment, Dirks-Edmund writes of a captivating tale of the mighty Douglas-firs, cedars and hemlocks that once grew there.

But as with anything, there's more to the story. This book is also about the lives of great and small creatures and plants, of slugs and worms, spiders and bugs, butterflies and birds, lichens and mosses.

This in-depth study has never been undertaken on a single western forest before, nor is it likely to ever be repeated, according to the publisher WSU Press. The title of the book refers to the fact that more than trees make up a forest.

It reveals all that is lost when an ancient forest is destroyed and the story of a tenacious woman, an ecologist who studied Oregon flora and fauna before there were guidebooks. The author stresses that this is not a technical book and one that could be enjoyed by anyone interested in the nature and ecology of the Northwest.

Dirks-Edmund began studying a small parcel of ancient forest in western Oregon while an undergraduate student, working with her mentor, James A. Macnab, at Linfield College in McMinnville. After several more years of schooling and teaching, she returned to studying her beloved forest through its logging in the 1940s and clear cutting in the 1980s.

Not Just Trees is a story close to Dirks-Edumund's heart which is shown through the pages with a passionate intensity. The deeper one reads into the book, the more her love for the forests wears on the reader. It inspires those who are concerned about what has been lost to have hope for the future of forests.


The Rhetoric of Immediacy
Published in Paperback by Princeton Univ Pr (14 November, 1994)
Authors: Bernard Faure and Claire Douglas
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wish I could get my money back
I had seen this book cited in many other books and so was expecting something useful. Man, was I disappointed. This book seemed to be written from an academic perspective of deconstructionism, of trying to make a name for yourself by upsetting the existing order, and by blowing things out of proportion and presenting them as great problems to be exposed, i.e. "straw men". For anyone interested in the genuine teachings and practice, or even historical developments and research, there are a lot of better books.

A brilliant deconstruction, this book reshapes Zen studies.
After reading the only existing review of this book, I felt the need to offer a counter-view. From the perspective of a scholar, this book fundamentally reshaped Chan/Zen studies. But from the perspective of a practitioner it also reshapes our views. Faure forces us to rethink the cherished illusions of Zen. Whether scholar or practitioner, we had best take up the challenge. It is tough going, but it is work which we all must do to be worthy of the tradition we study.

This book is riddled with arbitrary misinterpretations.
This book will recommend itself to those who believe that a run-of-the-mill contemporary college professor can have a deeper insight into what the Zen people were doing than they had themselves, and to those who believe that deconstructionism is more sophisticated than the Buddhist perspective on mind found in such works as the Avatamsaka Sutra and the Linji Lu.


Oh No! The Pink Flamingo Turned Green
Published in Paperback by Macmillan Education (02 April, 2002)
Authors: Marylin Sheffield and Katie McConnachie
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Jungian American Feminism
Translate this Darkness is an unevenly argued book that one cannot decide is about how dangerous men are to women or how dangerous women are to themselves, or how dangerous life is to the living.

While on the one hand author Claire Douglas describes her heroine, Christiana Morgan, in sympathetic terms almost exclusively, Carl Jung's and Henry Murray's influence on Mrs. Morgan is seen as predominantly destructive. Their general existence in her life -- as father figures, as receivers of her endlessly extolled beauty and erotic influence -- is seen as parasitic. They are all 'round exploitative conquerors of the feminine mystique

One cannot help but simply exclaim out loud at several points in the book, especially during the epilogue, what a load of hypocritical American feminist rubbish it is. Why doesn't Christiana just leave Murray, find someone else, and write something in her own right. Jung's 'women', after all, did not need his permission to write and create and have lives of their own.

Douglas claims that these men somehow did not allow Morgan to take responsibility for her own life. Her famous visions, painted by her, and the subject of a four-and-a-half year seminar by Jung in the 1930s (which Douglas has edited, published by Princeton) are considered by Douglas to be of biblical importance to the women of the world. Rather than being used to further an understanding of the feminine by Morgan, these visions were expropriated by Jung for his own supposedly deluded purposes, and were "feared" by Murray as they represented an overwhelming feminine "power" that must be thwarted, lest he lose his own masculine power to it.

First Jung: for the great part of Morgan's life he was simply 3,000 miles away in another part of the world, after the age of 50 making use of Morgan's visions as he made use of so much other diverse literature that influenced his ideas. To say that he unjustly "bent" Morgan's visions to satisfy his own theory of archetypes, thereby damaging Christiana Morgan's soul, becomes irreconcilable when one considers Douglas's statement that these visions also helped Jung to develop those theories (should have been good for her soul, no?)

Wolfgang Pauli's dreams and visions served the same purpose for Jung (see the book Atom and Archetype). Pauli, it may be argued, also lived a life of relatively unrealized potential. He had bouts of alcoholism as did Morgan, and died relatively young, but no one would think to lay this at Jung's feet, perhaps because Pauli was a man and had won a Nobel prize. Morgan was just a poor uneducated girl with a lot of potential that was subsumed by the power of male masculinity and not allowed to be realised into some Golden Flower, if we are to believe the thesis.

Now Murray: he was influenced by Jung to take Christiana as a mistress. This is because Murray was already married, as was Morgan. So it's a tough call who's at fault here. If it was a man's influence that has again ruined the life of yet another woman, blaming Murray for being the wrong man begs the question that there is probably a right man. If the answer is that there should be no man and that Morgan could have gone it alone with strength and conviction, why didn't she, if she had so much "power"? Perhaps she was not so powerful, after all, and certainly without Jung, her visions would not have seen the light of day, as they were "visioned" with his encouragement.

We are left simply with a melodrama of Jungian proportion, an analysis that has been terminated prematurely through the exhaustion and limitations of the two participants. Douglas comes in to pronounce that the unjust winners are still the men and losers the women, in the process ignoring or misrepresenting the success of the women in Jung's circle, and smarter women everywhere.

Men are once again back to being faulted for wanting something from women. To make something out of a mass of visions which would in another time and place be considered certifiable, is not enough. It remains with feminism that it must be the cake and the eating of it, too, something which, if Ms. Douglas would only admit, Jung and Murray were simply not able to have with the impunity she implies, and, therefore, not at all.

Error in author listing
Sorry, I don't know how to let you know other than this but you have an extra author's name in the listing of my book. It is by Claire Douglas alone. Your Chaire Douglas as co author needs to be deleted. Whoever is reading this please send it on to the right person. Thanks. C. D. As I'm on the subject: my The Woman in the Mirror is out again thanks to you, Holly, and Backinprint.com and through the authors guild. Could you also list it? Thank you.


GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers
Published in Paperback by Morgan Kaufmann (2000)
Author: Jeff Johnson
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my least favorite Jung seminar
Although peppered with Jung's usual mix of intuition with vast erudition, this seminar, based on a series of visions experienced by lay analyst Christiana Morgan, was painful to read, perhaps because Jung's racist bigotry and unresolved feelings toward women was so evident throughout it. He is particularly adept at interpreting women's strength and assertiveness as pathological animus activities, nor does he pause to wonder at the impatience in some of his statements or the disagreeing reactions of some of the women in his audience.

This quotation is out of context, of course, but its flavor illustrates what I mean: "I am afraid," decides Jung, "women often have a tendency to talk of things as they ought to be or as they desire them to be, or as they should become, but never as they are." UGH!! Still more alarming is how infrequently the audience openly questioned such outrageous remarks by the great man.

If you can get past all that and Jung's endless demonstrations of how smart he is, then you'll find treasures and glowing grottoes of psychological insight here and there, such as his brief description of how the Self differentiates out of the collective unconscious.

This edition has an informative intro that sums up some of the other issues brought into the seminar and why it was prematurely terminated.

Jung at His Best
Masterful. Not only do we see here Jung's impressive grasp of psyche, symbol, and the history of symbolic manifestation, there is a most subtle handling of the course material, which almost seems to have a life of its own. Just when we might think that things in the seminar are going awry, Jung comes back with a clear purpose, meaning, and illumination on the subject at hand. Highly recommended for anyone interested in Jung's ideas and the symbolic manifestations of the psyche.


Faith in Law: Essays in Legal Theory
Published in Hardcover by Hart Publishing (2000)
Authors: Peter Oliver, Sionadh Douglas Scott, Victor Tadros, Zenon Bankowski, Anthony Bradney, Claire Davis, John Gardner, Adam Gearey, and Tim MacKlem
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Taking Form: Claire Barclay, Douglas Cocker, David Connearn, Paul Kelly,
Published in Paperback by Fruitmarket Gallery (1995)
Author: Alan Woods
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The Woman in the Mirror: Analytical Psychology and the Feminine
Published in Paperback by iUniverse.com (2000)
Author: Claire Douglas
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