Review
"The book reflects its author's profound moral sense and vast erudition in areas ranging from clinical psychology to scripture and a good deal of personal soul-searching and experience...with patients who include prisoners, alcoholics and the mentally ill."
-Montreal Gazette
"This is not a book to be abstracted and summarized. Rather it should be read at leisure...and employed as a stimulus and reference to expand one's own maps of meaning. I plan to return to Peterson's musings and mapping many times over the next few years."
-"Am J Psychiatry
..."a brilliant enlargement of our understanding of human motivation...a beautiful work."
-Sheldon H. White, Harvard University
..."unique...a brilliant new synthesis of the meaning of mythologies and our human need to relate in story form the deep structure of our experiences."
-Keith Oatley, University of Toronto
Craig Lambert, Harvard Magazine, September-October 1998
... a sweeping theory of narrative, belief, meaning and religion... the book's bibliography ranges through existentialist philosophers and literary critics, as well as Dante, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Stephen Hawking, C.G. Jung, Lao Tzu, Konrad Lorenz, brain scientist A.R. Luria, Milton, Nietzsche, Piaget, Solzhenitsyn, Voltaire and Wittgenstein... a grand, sprawling, ambitious undertaking, an intellectual adventure that aims to synthesize disparate knowledge in the classic, old-fashioned tradition of social science.
