Will Self Books

This is a well written book by a very intelligent and educated author, but it is not what I expected. I guess I didn't really know what I expected, but this was not it.

I simply wanted to read some scriptures about animals in Heaven and possibly why. Although there are some scriptures in the book, (several), they are buried in the text, laboriously, one by one and none of them seemed to be revalent.

The author talks more about religous principles, (which is OK), than he does animals in Heaven. What I would like to see is a list of scriptures and then some explanation.

This book is more for the intellectual than the curious.

After reading this book no one could ever truly believe animals will not be in heaven. I never realized the bible tells so much about the animal kingdom.
The scriptures in this book pertaining to animals is almost unbelievable. The scriptures are straight from the bible exactly as written. The author explains the scriptures as to their true meaning. I can't understand how a minister could say animals have no soul or Holy Spirit, and could never enter into heaven. This book clearly reveals many scriptures telling us animals do have a soul and spirit, and they will go to heaven. The book even explains why the animals are to be resurrected at the coming of Christ.
I will never be convinced by anyone that the bible tells nothing about animals going to heaven. I know according to God's word I will see my animals again if I am fortunate enough to go to heaven.

In 1987, the World's Best Doctor wrote a handbook for other physicians (Kill as Few Patients as Possible), that hilariously passed on choice tricks of the trade. Now managed care has made it impossible for Dr. London to care for his patients in the exemplary fashion he laid out - and so he's written the book that will allow patients to get this excellent care on their own. From spelling out the medications and diagnostic interventions which have been proven to help prevent disease, to a list of the symptoms which mandate a visit to your doctor TODAY, this book may be lifesaving.

Not nearly as amusing, nor as heartwarming, as Dr. London's first book, "Kill As Few Patients As Possible." Still an enjoyable read, just not as much fun.

The wonderful book really had me understanding the importance of honoring myself - filling up so that I have more to give!
There were many concepts, not necessarily new to me, yet presented in a fashion that I had never previously considered.
Very enlightening.
Linda Kedy...

Dr. Jill Kahn and her husband Danny seemed to have it all, but still weren't happy. They ignored that emotional emptiness until Danny received a diagnosis of a malignant brain tumor. That wake-up call forced them to look at their lives more analytically. In her search, Dr. Jill learned if we constantly give of ourselves and never take the time or effort to "fill our own wells", we can't survive--physically or spiritually. We must first ask ourselves what we truly desire before we can pray to receive God's intended gifts.

Read The Gift of Taking today and learn what she has taught many of her patients. You, too, can live a full, satisfying life. It's there just for the taking.

--Becky at Author, Author!

Perhaps it's just my sense of humor, but I read the first few pages online and laughed out loud in some sections. Good job!

Reading this book is like getting on the bus departing at midnight from Las Vegas to Chicago. All seats are taken except the one next to a guy who starts his rant before you leave the depot. In Georgia-based Bear Brooks's case it's what jackasses the Democrats are, the Republicans, Corporate CEO's, lawyers, airlines, telemarketers, etc. Just when you think you can't take it anymore he hits upon a topic with which you agree: Why do they keep collecting tolls after the roads are paid for? How come new cars dent like beer cans? Who thinks labels are necessary like the one on an iron that warns you not to iron clothes while wearing them? This book not only raises the question of why we should listen to experts but also why we should listen to someone who says to the reader, "You may be smarter than I am, but I have one thing to say to that: who cares!" For one thing, Bear is an equal-opportunity smart ass. Nothing and no one is off limits, and every once in a while that's refreshing. For another, he forces us to wonder why we believe what we do. How many better books can claim as much?

And finally, he is funny with chapter headings such as "My God Can Beat Up Your God" and "'I Do Not Pay for Sex; I'm Married.' (Yeah, Right)." Who are not jackasses, you ask? Surprise. Brooks identifies radio talk-show hosts as guys with the gonads to say what needs to be said. Nevertheless, after the bus starts to empty you remain in the seat with him, and before long you're saying good-bye. You might not want to invite Bear Brooks's ideas home with you, but the time reading his book goes quickly. Hurray for the common man! Now where's my beer?

It's not bad, I've just had better. I can't get to specific because I haven't heard it in so long. I'm not using it, if that helps. I listened to it once.

The Sweet Dreams CD is incredible. For over a year I've taken several different sleep aids, and while I might fall asleep, I never slept for very long. In the mornings I would feel groggy and tired. But, after listening to Sweet Dreams, I slept the entire night! I'm now sleeping soundly, all night long with out taking any medications, and I'm waking up feeling great. Thank you so much!

I got to this book years after having read self-help books such as Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain, all of Carlos Castaneda, books about TAO and Zen, Edward DeBono, books about creativity, learning and thinking, various ancient oriental and North American aboriginal authors, etc. I have to rate it very highly as being useful WHEN YOU NEED TO GET TO ACTION. This is a rare thing.

Books that have that authentic ability to trigger you to action are rare, and Gawains book is one. The Act Of Will is also constantly useful to me, as a way to help me clarify my own strengths and weaknesses, and to quickly focus on progress. I got into publishing, but a recession came upon the market, and I got demotivated. I tell you, you can't afford to give up on your own highest aspirations. Will power, from start to finish of some act of creative endeavor, is a challenge. Failures on that path, like bodies in a vicious war, are stacked very very high.

To make your own way in any endeavor, you will find your inspirations, goals, and will power coming up against limits, both internal and external. The Act Of Will really helped me see again, and to feel again, the real value and deserved attention that my publishing was. I should not have let it drift, but I was on my own.

To anyone who can relate to either being or feeling alone when you consider some venture, then why not gather some terrific support. Best advisors are rarely there when you need them (in the flesh). So instead, take the personal advice from geniuses, and get on with it!!

Take this book home and use it. I hope the will power to do that much, is with you today. This book will greatly improve the odds that your will power will be much more consistent and powerful in the very near future.

Cheers!!!!!!!!!!!

Will Self is a writer totally committed, like his idol, J.G. Ballard, to contemporary Western culture. Not for him the elegant, self-enclosed humanistic world of novels where rounded characters play out a parlour game morality tale, with a clear resolution at the end.

Self, quite rightly, prefers his fiction to cut a little looser than that. For nearly 20 years he has been holding a satirical mirror to contemporary British life, and forcing his readers to look again at what their lives, their very selves, actually consist of. (Sadly, the people who really need to do this most don't tend to read this type of book, but what can you do).

Away from the Grey Area of London, the Butt takes place in a completely fictional country, part Australia, part Iraq, part neo-Conradian heart of darkness. It is billed by its publisher as an allegory of the post September 11 Liberal conscience - but this is not a satire as you might expect, contemning the imperialist foreign policy of the Bush/Blair axis. Well it is. But not quite. And it certainly is strange.

Self has said in interviews promoting this book that he feels in contemporary British cultural and political life, you are at liberty to say pretty much anything, and nothing gets listened to. To make an impact, you need to start from first principles. So he creates a protagonist, Tom Brodzinsky (clearly American, though never explicitly stated) who carelessly hurls his cigarette butt off the balcony where he is vacationing with his family. It lands on the head of Reggie Lincoln and scars him. Reggie takes this amiably enough, but the problem is he's married to a Tayswengo woman, and this indigenous people's don't believe in accidents. After a kangaroo court, a sort of show trial, Tom is dispatched across a bizarre, Mad Max esque apocalyptic wilderness accompanied by the odious Prentice (English, though never made explicit). Prentice, Tom suspects, is guilty of a much graver crime (child abuse), but the two men are yoked together as they venture out to make reparations to the afflicted tribe.

Given that many people find themselves in a quandry as to what to make of current events in the Middle East - are you uneasy, for instance, with the way America is determined to impose it's curious cost/benefit analysis democracy through the barrel of a gun, yet certainly don't want to be seen supporting the murderous Baathist regime? - I think Self does an original and intelligent job in trying to make sense of our mental terrain. Tom and Reggie clearly have no idea what they are doing - they struggle with hypocricies (condeming genital circumcision/ogling the breasts of the native tribeswomen), are completely at sea with the prevailing moral culture, and face violent counter-insurgents and bizzarre local rituals.

Tom is convinced the trip is about dispensing with Prentice - yet as events grow darker, he is plagued by ever more weird dreams, including one in which is is turned into a cigarette. Things are not what they seem - and Tom and Prentice wind up in a confrontation with the Levi-Straussesque anthropologist, Von Sasser, who explains to them the truth behind the belief system they have been imbroiled in.

There is so much post September 11 fiction around at the moment, but most of it is facile, and written by men and women who clearly have no idea what the zeitgeist has turned into. Self is too intelligent a left winger to fall into the trap that many of his coevals have blundered into: letting blinkered anti-American thinking ally themselves with the worst reactionary barbaric people in the world. But making sense of the moral climate in a satire is very very difficult to do in todays uneasy climate, swinging as it does between hypocritical moral relativism and scary neo-con warmongering. A very difficult novel to pull off, and Self just about does it.

Feeding Frenzy is an excellent eclectic collection of the journalism of Will Self between 1995-2000. It will probably appeal to British readers mostly, as the themes are inextricably linked to those of the metropolitan intellectual zeitgeist through these years - Brit lit, architecture, Oasis, zany travel to ice hotels in Scandanavia and mystic experiences in Turkey, restaurant reviews, Virgin Trains. Many of the familiar tropes of middle class urban life on this small island.

The style is zappy, snappy and savagely witty, larded over with a thick dose of surrealism, familiar to readers of Self's fiction. The vocabulary is rich - each page is pungently studded with words and neologisms that will strain even the most expansive dictionary.

And gonzo - admittedly not as much as the self destructive excesses as Hunter S. Thomson, one of Self's acknowledged influences, but still - extensive alcohol and substance intake (vodka gets 11 mentions in the index).

Very helpful in my work with the dying and their families.

I think this book is a great tool to write your will. It takes you through the steps one by one and lets you know exactly what to do. I think that everyone should own it.