A great book that captures the feel of Hawaii. Victoria's Hawaii is gone but the 'feel' of the place is timeless. Her description of Hawaiian music,plate lunches and hundreds of other details of island life are right on target. If you've been captivated by the idea of island life...read this book. You'll be on the beach,breathing in plumerias as long as your eyes cross the words.

I was introduced to this book by a writer who had lived in Hawaii for most of the '70s, and she felt that it was one of the best personal memoirs of living in Hawaii that she had read. Nelson taught at the University of Hawaii in the '70s, and traveled throughout the islands. She captures the beauty, the sadness, the cultural tensions and improbable harmonies of a people and a setting that is so much more than a Waikiki Beach tourist-trap destination. Her description of the people of Moloka'i was one my motivations to find the true meaning of **Aloha** and visit what may be the friendliest place in Hawai'i. St. Martin's should at least bring it back in trade paperback - the travel sections of most bookstores are dying for a distinctly different look at one of the most fascinating and spiritual places in the world

The title really doesn't do the scope of this book justice. I picked up this book because I was having some problems with a novel in progress. Then I read it and just sighed....clear insight into the writing process, the good, and useless, habits we form and their impact on our productivity. The book addresses a wide spectrum, such as: "Beginner's Block", Procrastination, Perfectionism, Obsessive Rewriting, and Success. Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned professional, this book should be part of your toolbox. It will get you writing....happily.

After publishing my first book, I thought the next one would be easier. That was definitely not the case but after reading "On Writer's Block," I am slowly making my way back to the writing table. This book helped take a whole new look at how I approach writing. I would highly recommend it to anyone wishing to be a part of any creative process. Thank you Victoria Nelson for writing this book. It is wonderfully inspiring.

When I read in the preface of "On Writer's Block" that it was based on the tenets of humanistic psychology so popular in the mid-80's, I groaned. Not another book telling me to get in touch with my inner child! Well, it may be a case of "when the student is ready, the teacher will appear," but this book helped bring me out of a seven-year struggle with wanting desperately to write, but not being able to.

The key is not to take the "inner child" notion too literally, but to look on it as a metaphor that can help bridge the gap between the subconscious (the realm of myth and dreams) and the conscious (the rational world, whose demands and vagaries we seek to illuminate). If you are constantly barking orders at your inner self, as I have for years, treating it as a recalcitrant subordinate who is going to be in big trouble if he doesn't get with the program, then there's no wonder the poor kid cringes in the corner and refuses to come out. Victoria Nelson urges us to think about creativity as a form of play, a release of emotions, truths, and insights that is unmediated by analysis or judgment.

I've run across the notion of creativity as play before, in Julia Cameron's "Artist Way" and "Vein of Gold," but have successfully resisted the beneficial effects of Cameron's rituals for years. (Nevertheless I recommend these books very highly--they may have helped set the stage for my breakthrough here.) Nelson's approach is different. Each short chapter is like the soft voice of an old friend, cutting right to the heart of things and giving you the hard truths you need to hear. If any of the chapter titles in this book ring the slightest bell for you--if, in fact, you are interested enough in this topic to be reading this review--then you owe it to yourself to take a look at this book.

The problems I had with this book were all the more jarring because it reads like a catalog of my favorite subjects. It's exciting to see such disparite threads woven together into a fairly broad picture of a ubiquitous neo-platonist 'underground' within mass-culture. Unfortunately, Nelson's scholarship often seems shallow or slap-dashed. The author frequently mentions things in passing that deserve deeper consideration in the context of her thesis. Conversely, she occasionally illustrates her ideas with unsatisfactory and unnecessarily dull examples. I found a few factual and referential errors that the editor(s) should have caught. And some of her examples don't really support her ideas very well, as her interpretations of a wide range of materials seem over-simplified. All of this results in a picture no less blurry than it already was in my head. An unflattering characature of an interesting line of thinking. On the positive side, her writing is friendly and inviting, unencumbered by academic aggression or silly neologisms. I would recommend this only to people who have never given any though to the inherent perversity behind puppets, golems and other post-human constructions of experience. An extra star for the book's title.

This is a book that at times reads a bit like a Ph.D. thesis, but's it really much better than that.

If you've ever entertained the idea that popular films such as The Matrix, or TV shows (X-Files) might be saying something interesting about ideas in today's world at some deeper level, but you're not really sure what it is, this is the book to read. Nelson shows how Robocop, the Terminator and so on are just the latest puppets standing in for a certain way of thinking about the world, even a 'religious' way of thinking, that in fact is very ancient in Western society. It's been driven into eclipse by our modern, scientific, and materialistic society, but becomes strangely ascendant the moment we walk into a movie theatre, read a Stephen King novel, or listen to a conversation about an 'interesting' movie at the water cooler. Why? Well, buy Nelson's book.

I could imagine this book being misread as an attack on conventional religion, but it really has nothing to do with that. I could also imagine that some readers, not accustomed to slogging their way through terms such as 'Platonism', 'demiurge,' and so on, might miss out on finer moments in Nelson's work, when she casts off the robes of the academic (which don't really suit her, anyway) and speaks in plain language about her ideas.

In any case, this is a fine book well worth a careful reading in my opinion.

If you have bookshelves at home covering sci-fi/fantasy/horror, mythology, AI, psychology, alchemy, animation, and semiotics, and know them only as "things I'm interested in" without being aware of any other common thread, Victoria Nelson just might convince you that you are interested in those things for the same reason she is, and that people throughout history have been: you are mapping a geography of human imagination, taking a journey that you can't help but pursue. Although the book is structured as a history of ideas, there's an autobiography being told, too, about a precocious, sensitive kid fleeing grad school to Hawaii (just as I did) only to return years later "to finish the PhD thesis I never wrote". Along the way, you'd find many great books and films you may never have heard of.