Two very good extended poems - 'Leda' at the start and 'Soles Occidere Et Redire Possunt' at the end (Suns can set, and suns can rise again). The intervening stuff is less good - kind of overblown stuff that gives the era a bad name.

I had always assumed that Huxley was not much of a poet, judging from the occasional snippet in the novels, but Leda is well worth a look, esp as an example of the early Huxley.

Between the drawing of the blinds, and the dawning of yet another day...

First off, let me say I enjoy most of Huxley's work. The style of this book is totally different from the usual Huxley method. I've never read anything else by Christopher Isherwood. This book starts out boring, and ends boring. That's really the sum of it. The characters are flat and extremely simple. In his early work (say, pre "Brave New World"), Huxley's characters are an embodiment of one single trait. However, they are always developed well, and their thought processes are complex while remaining within this one trait. This book has the same characterization - Jacob, for example, is moronically kind and simple (think Forrest Gump). There are also the classic evil tricksters, and so on. It's not done well at all, and I left this book with a bad taste in my mouth.

Interesting how Hollywood types embrace such spiritual ideas without commiting to one chosen path. This work starts with an incredible insight into some of Jesus' words yet speaks to healing as a natural and mystical experience. I'd think the Creator would be more included in the reasoning.
Well worth reading. Many, many thanks to Sharon Stone for recognizing the beauty of this fable and giving it new life at this end of the century.

This screenplay is the collaborative effort of Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley. This work has an unpolished feel to it and may have been an unfinished work. However, the stark and unadorned quality of the work adds rather than detracts from its message.

It is a fable about a ranch hand, Jacob, who discovers that he can heal animals with his touch. The owner of the ranch is a widowed college professor with a physically handicapped adult daughter. The professor resents his daughter and wastes no effort in hiding his feelings. The daughter desperately wants freedom and independence. She asks Jacob to heal her.

The screenplay's uncomplicated message is that physical health alone does not make a person whole or happy. This work is unlike anything else by Huxley in its simplicity and ambiguous final paragraphs. It is a short work and is easily finished in one or two sittings.

Some narratives remain forever crispy and fresh,enjoyable and interesting through the decades. Some books are a renewed joy to reopen after months of neglect. This is not one of those book. This is only a pompous, stale, verbose, boring and dilute would-be Saki. Read Saki's stories, and you'll see the difference!

Although Huxley is best known for his novels, essays and early LSD experimentation, this collection of stories is wonderful. They represent a broad period in Huxley's craft, and each one is intriguing in its own way. Huxley shows, here, that he's a master of the short story; he can grip the reader in any form of writing.

This book is a collection of five lectures given in 1960 by the author, Douglas Stewart. Each lecture focuses on the unifying religious themes in five 20th Century authors: James Joyce (apocalytypticism), Aldous Huxley (mysticism), Graham Greene (Catholicism), Rose Macauley (Anglicanism) and Joyce Cary (Protestantism).

Stewart writes well in impressive, quotable language. He also weaves in comparisons of the featured novelists to other great writers. I can see where this book would be useful to someone writing a research paper. However, for someone like me who is just looking for insight into a couple of great minds from the past century, there really isn't anything earth-shattering in this book. Yes, James Joyce's rejection of religion, particularly Catholism, is apparent in his works. Yes, mystical union with God (which Stewart calls "detachment") is pervasive in Aldous Huxley's works. Yes, Graham Greene's work portrays characters whose lives conflict with their Catholicism. I didn't find much in these lectures that wasn't obvious.

Stewart did issue an intriguing challenge concerning the works of Aldous Huxley -- he claims that a chronological reading of Huxley's works will demonstrate Huxley's spiritual journey to increasing detachment and pessimism. I'm no expert on Huxley, but from what I've read, I see just the opposite -- a journey from the utter hopelessness seen in his early novels to the meaningful, rich and happy inner life implicit in the later novels and explicit in his religious essays.

Do not read this book, except perhaps for sociological insight. The great writer is no poet.

I actually really enjoyed reading this poetry. Some poems were not that great, but most made me feel that I was getting a glimpse into Huxley's mind. I would check it out.

While it was probably fascinating at the time it was published, the science in this little book has become increasingly dated, and the conclusions Mann drew from it sound increasingly strange as a result. Mann was one of the first Westerners to become truly intrigued by acupuncture, but this treatment of the subject comes across as misinformed and somewhat arrogant or patronizing, almost thirty years later. A vast amount of research into the physiological effects of acupuncture has been published since this book's first printing. Acupuncture Efficacy, by Birch and Hammerschlag, is a relatively current survey of controlled studies.

Mann's book has introduced many to the subject of acupuncture. Too bad that it's so far from presenting acupuncture on its own terms, and that it hasn't been updated to include current research. Kaptchuk's "the Web that Has No Weaver" contains less specifically acupuncture-oriented information, but it is probably still the best general introduction to Chinese medicine, of which acupuncture is a part.