Books (November 2006)

Williamson, Vivien. Bach Remedies and Other Flower Essences.  London: Lorenz Books, 2000.    96 pp.   $17.95    3 pp refs

This is a great resource book on flower essences for the beginner.  The book orients the reader about the history of flowers, Edward Bach and the influence of homeopathic research.  There is quite a bit of information on how Edward Bach created his flower essence system and the components that make it up today.  Given that the Bach system was the first system of its kind for flowers, understanding all this history is educational.

Drawing on the life work of Edward Bach, Vivien Williamson  provides a strong foundation of understanding for flower essences, including how to make and store them, how to use them most effectively, and how to prescribe them. Beautiful pictures orient the reader to the different flowers used for healing.  Aesthetically, this book is very pleasing and easy to use.  The pictures and layout of text make finding pertinant information easy and draws the reader in to continue to the next page.
         (Read more in the latest issue of IJHC)

Book review by Deborah Pratt
MBA, BSJ, Holos University Graduate Seminary Doctoral Student

Malcolm Gladwell.  Blink:  The Power of Thinking without Thinking.  New York, NY:  Little, Brown and Company, 2005.  277 pp   $25.95.  11 refs

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestselling book, The Tipping Point, is challenging the way we make decisions in this new book.   Gladwell investigates all of those decisions that we make in the blink of an eye, quickly and effortlessly.  However, these decisions are much more complex than they seem. 

 

While not addressing intuition outright, he talks about such things as thinking without thinking, using gut instinct and making snap decisions with little conscious information.  All of these descriptions would also describe intuition.  Gladwell says that we are “innately suspicious of this kind of rapid cognition.  We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it.” (1)  Through the discourse of his book, we see that more information is not always better.

Gladwell starts his book with the theory of thin slices.  This theory postulates how we make decisions with very minimal external information, based on information in our unconscious mind...
         (Read more in the latest issue of IJHC)

Book review by Deborah Pratt
MBA, BSJ, Holos University Graduate Seminary Doctoral Student