September 8: 2 Books

36. Arnold Ehret's Rational Fasting by [surprise] Arnold Ehret

This is a reread of one of the better books on the topic of dietary cleansing. It is a very short book, and not nearly as full of menus or health statistics or food profile charts with comparative nutritional values as most modern day dieting books. This 182 page volume is a collection of early 1900's lectures and essays by German nutritionist and Professor Arnold Ehret, in which he describes the founding principles of his Mucousless Diet (another of his books that I used to have and sold on Amazon several years ago was The Mucousless Diet Healing System by the same author).

Basically, the Mucousless Diet suggests that milk products and most grains and meats, as well as all starchy vegetables, produce a sticky sludge during [incomplete] digestion -- a sludge that manifests itself as mucous and internal cloggings which literally lead to illness and various diseases, from the common cold to much more serious life-threatening conditions. Ehret proposes that by eliminating most, if not all, of these foods from the human diet, we can literally unclog our bodies and clean out years of internal blockages, thus allowing for much improved health, energy, and vitality. Ehret proposes a diet entirely composed of fruits and non-starchy vegetables. For several years, since reading his other Mucousless book, I have tried to eat mostly fruits and green and other colored veggies. I definitely feel the difference -- especially when I eat processed food and other crap!

37. Myths to Live By by Joseph Campbell

Reading this book was an interesting experience. I will explain...

When I was in college and during the first maybe 5- years after I finished my undergraduate degree, Joseph Campbell was a sort of hero to me. After watching his series of conversations with journalist Bill Moyers, broadcast on PBS as The Power of Myth in the late 80s and assigned as required course materials for one of my Duke University cultural anthropology classes in the early 90s, I was hooked.

This said, I was incredibly disappointed at how bored I was while reading this compilation of Cooper Union lectures from the 1960s. I am planning to read all 4 volumes of The Masks of God by Campbell during the remainder of my 100 Book Challenge, and I can only hope that his writing will again prove as interesting and inspiring to me as it was when I was in college. A lot can change in 20 years. I send out positive energy to reinforce the notion that my interest in folklore, mythology and comparative religion -- my greatest academic interest when I was a junior and senior in college -- will have carried through to today to enough of a degree that I will enjoy the rest of Joseph Campbell's books that I intend to read in the coming weeks!

...
So far, I have read 37 books in the past 12 days.
[I am not keeping track of page counts at this point in time, but I am sure someone out there will be interested, so I promise to give a final tally of total pages read once the 30 days is up!]