The Druid Way (Earth Quest)

Rating:
Summary: A very good book about Man's place on the Earth.
Review: If your looking for a book on druidry, you may find this book a little dissapointing. This book is a book that analises man's place on earth, his problems and emotions using some druidic concepts. It is not on druidry, although it could function as an introduction to the concept. This is a very good book and I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested on what has happened to man's relationship with nature.

Rating:
Summary: Great read.
Review: Once again, Philip Carr-Gomm is NOT an anthropologist and hisbooks are NOT about the ancient druids. Druidry is a modern beliefwith only occasional ties to events/beliefs of 2000 years ago, just as modern Christianity is.

I finished this book with a feeling of peace, it was almost a meditation to read it. However, I got very little practical information out of it. I certainly don't feel that it is "a complete description of the Druid Way." The comments by the author are closer to the book than the "synopsis" is. Wonderfully written, this book brings together a stroll around the countryside with the grief of a loss of a friend to show a path to enlightenment through the power and beauty of the earth.

...if you want to know about ancient druids, check out "The Druids" by Stuart Piggot or "The Celts" by T. G. E. Powell. The fact of the matter is the historical druids committed very little to paper until after they were assimilated into the Culdee church. And that all had the taint of Christianity on it.

Rating:
Summary: Bright, Mercurial, Energizing
Review: Philip Carr-Gomm's intelligence - not unlike Andrew Harvey's - has a bright, mercurial and energizing quality that immediately stimulates interest and attention. Far superior to a rote historical study, his book is an experiential pilgrimage, a first-hand account that could only be charted by someone as sufficiently steeped in the ideas from the inside of his skin as is Philip. And here is where it begins: high on the downlands above Lewes on the South Downs Way, as he stands on Itford Hill at the outset of his circular journey of excursion and return. From here, in twenty-one chapters, he unfolds a compelling narrative that is both story and exploration, memory and discourse, homily and lyric exposition, coloured with his own immediate psychic perception.
'I plead very guilty to being indeed my own ancestor', as Nuinn is quoted in the book...and what is everywhere present here is the presence of the past that the whole landscape resonates, and that Philip unearths, naming original place names, tracking lost paths gone to grass and cut through by our present roads - and he does so with a sense of detail reminiscent of Gilbert White, though his canvas is larger.
Jay Ramsay

Rating:
Summary: This whole book is a delight!
Review: This whole book is a delight. It is the diary of a sacred journey, through sacred space, and through the heart and mind, as well as a useful practical guide to the countryside and its associations and history. It is a book to use and to keep and to remember.
Asphodel