Rating: 
Summary: Leaves you wanting more -- and not in a good way
Review: "The Soul's Code" starts with an interesting idea, the Acorn Theory, where an individual's talents lies as dormant and inevitable as the oak tree inside an acorn. Those essential qualities of one's talents are fed and nurtured throughout one's life, and while the final size, shape and appearance of a tree are determined by many factors, the acorn will grow into an oak as long as it is able to grow. Not a pine tree, not a rose bush, not a ficus, but an oak. And while this theory applied to humans is an interesting and somewhat far-fetched one, it does have a certain appeal, explaining why some people have an almost preternatural gift for art, music, writing, speech and so on. Basically, their acorns were allowed to grow into what they were destined to be, unfettered and unrestrained.But maintaining this theory is a bit of a magic act, requiring some sleights-of -hand and diversions to keep the audience from picking up on those telling signs that something else is going on. Hillman tries to come up with a grand theory that can explain genius, but contradicts himself on some points along the way. The biggest one I found, or the one that bothered me the most, anyway, explained violent and destructive acts. In Chapter 10, "The Bad Seed, " he uses as examples both Adolf Hitler and a woman named Mary Bell, who, at 10 years of age, strangled to death two boys, aged four and three, in two separate incidents. In both of these people, says Hillman, a lifetime of indicators showed that these were evil acorns leading to evil oaks. Hmm, interesting, except that in every other example and anecdote he related in the preceding chapters, people would become violent when their true talents were not allowed to take shape. In the very first chapter he uses the example of Elias Canetti, Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1981, and his confrontation at age five with his slightly older cousin, who was learning to read and write. When she teases him and refuses to let him see her notebooks, holding them above her head and out of his reach: "All at once, I left her there and walked the long way around the house to the kitchen yard, to get the Armenian's ax and kill her with it...I raised the ax high and...marched back over the long path into the courtyard with a murderous chant on my lips, repeating incessantly: ...'Now I'm going to kill Laurica! Now I'm going to kill Laurica!'" How cute! Hillman's response? "They seem to have no other choice. Canetti had to have letters and words; how else could he ever be a writer?" That's all? One is left with the old conundrum: What if Hitler had been a better painter? It seems flippant and facetious, but with everything Hillman has written to this point, it seems a valid question. What if Hitler, Mary Bell, and any other evil individual in history were encouraged to develop their talents, to tend to their acorns? Hillman dismisses such thoughts. Hitler was inherently evil, and he goes to great lengths to try and prove this. Only a person who was born evil and had talents only for evil deeds could do what he did and what Mary Bell did. While Elias Canetti may run around, swinging an ax at his cousin to get her notebooks -- a disproportionate response to the situation if ever there was one -- that's just the passion of his latent talent exercising a kind of survival instinct. Hitler's "cold stare" as a child, however, proved that he would grow up to be a genocidal maniac. Huh? The book's reach exceeds its grasp, though, and the whole thing starts crumbling from that point on. It had taken an effort from the beginning to make the whole theory hold together in my mind, but once the doubt seeped in, it was difficult to resist finding an example of my own for every one he used, easily poking holes in his reasoning. While "The Soul's Code" makes for an interesting launching point for a bull session, it doesn't work as a grand psychological theory.
Rating: 
Summary: If you are in search of character of calling, look here
Review: Excellent book, profound and wise and digestible
Rating:
Summary: Not specific enough
Review: For anyone looking for direction, this book fails. Theory is fine, but I found myself asking repeatedly, "OK, what do I DO about this?" The book offered few, if any , answers. If you want to find YOUR soul's code, don't look to this book for any help.
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Summary: The place to start! Everyone needs to read this book!
Review: For anyone who wishes to learn psycology this is book 1! Mr. Hillman is in the work of saving Souls, and weather you or a friend has been injured, this book is what you need! Every one needs to read this book!
Rating: 
Summary: good vibrations
Review: good and possitive vibrations is what you get after reading this book. I like the whole reasoning that it gives for "following your bliss". It makes you feel justified when you are doing that which you like most, in that you are really keeping in touch with your innermost layer and building the stronghold of your being. I didn't like, though, the stress on famous people. The author could have also picked an example of an ordinary but happy and successful life story.
Rating: 
Summary: Basic truths, basic misunderstandings
Review: Hillman has written a fair enough book here. I like the use of anecdotes and biography. They give the book a refreshingly human feel, as opposed to coldly scientific accounts which often throw out the baby with the bathwater - ie. all that is essentially human, because the essence of being human is invisible. The human spirit is invisible, the Daimon is invisible. But this does not necessarily mean they do not exist. The book suffers from one overriding weakness. Hillman repeatedly fails to distinguish the difference between the voice of the Daimon and the lower impulses of the ego. In my opinion the Daimon is essentially a positive force calling from within to help one reach one's highest potential, and to work with the gifts that one has. Yet it is not the only inner impulse that we have. If Jack the Ripper is driven by insatiable rage and sexual disfunction, is this also the voice of the Daimon? Hillman says so, but I disagree. Neurosis is by and large a function of one's personal history, one's traumas, one's abuses. It is the unconscious conditioning process that emerges from these experiences that creates these inner compulsions, the unhealthy or even demonic behaviors that we may possess. Hillman's seeming rejection of all contemporary psychology's insights seems rather poorly founded. Hillman is wrong to say that Hitler was driven by his Daimon. Hitler was driven by an altogether different part of the psyche. The ability to distinguish between the lower and higher impulses of one's own psyche is an absolutely essential aspect of spiritual and mental health, and Hillman's failure to understand this could be potentially harmful. It could well be seen as a validation of those lower impulses.
Rating:
Summary: Jump on the Bandwagon, Make a Buck
Review: His next book will, I suppose, have something about angels in its title. Or is that angles? A lot of neoplatonist claptrap, this one. Mr. Hillman should perhaps do some studying of modern cognitive science.
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Summary: One of the greatest books I've ever read
Review: I read a lot, but this book by Hillman's is one of my all-time favorites. His perspective is brilliant, unapologetically counter-culture, enormously insightful and deeply inspiring. There's a sarcastic bite to his writing that makes it even more entertaining: you sense that this man is no pushover. I won't even attempt to summarize Hillman's argument here. Read this book if you've ever been curious about the soul, or why a life work sometimes seems at odds with the "human" story, or if you've agonized over the search for meaning in your own life. By way of context, I'll mention that my interest in understanding the soul more deeply is professional as well as personal. I've published the how-to video "Thrill Your Soul: Inspiration for Choosing Your Work and Relationships," and I work with clients and students to help them connect with their life purpose. When it comes to this topic, I'm not as sardonically no-nonsense as Hillman appears to be from his writing, but it still takes a lot to impress me. Hillman has become one of my heroes, thanks to this magnificent book.
Rating:
Summary: Poor grammar, second class reasoning
Review: I stopped reading this book at page 60. I gave him 20 pages to redeem himself at page 40. Sophistry, sexism and parental phobia run rampant through his poorly constructed sentences. His argument against chronological causality is rendered defunct when he argues for daimon as the cause. I do not deny the possibility of the daimon but why must it be so single minded? Are there not multiple callings? Cannot a person be coded or guided for multiple missions including love? The absence of love as a destiny, of daimon inspired parental love makes Hillman's book chilling and uninspired. I would argue that Hillman, if being true to his daimon, is destined merely to be exceptionally bitter. The fact that this book was published would indicate, according to his philosophy, that Hillman's daimon resonates with many others. Cannot the daimons be at fault?
Rating:
Summary: Good ideas, bad execution
Review: I was ready to like what Hillman had to say. The idea that we each have a calling -- some marriage of talent, interest and drive toward a specific destiny -- appeals to me. In fact, I liked many of Hillman's concepts (importance of beauty, the parental fallacy, over-medication of our youth, abandoning the 'invisibles,' having a vision for your children). However, the execution was attrocious. Whenever I knew anything about the studies that Hillman was quoting, I found them to be twisted out of context. I showed the section on beauty to a friend who is writing a dissertation on aesthetics, and he (my friend) pointed out a number of mistakes. (For instance, Hillman quotes Thomas Aquinas saying that beauty arrests motion. What Aquinas actually says is that it is impossible to see true beauty in the world. He says that pure beauty is only present in God, the unmoved mover. So, while to see God would be to see a lack of motion, Hillman is really stretching Aquinas's words to use this philosphy to say that taking time for beautiful things would slow down our fast-paced lives and bring us inner peace.) Also, I wanted more detail for some of his ideas. He never really tells us how to grow down or "feed" our individual daimon. In the final analysis, I would have liked better research, more focus on how to implement his principles, and perhaps less sarcasm about any other theory that doesn't agree with his.
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