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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Balanced and thought-provoking, March 30, 2006
If you can find a copy of this (seems to be out of print), and are interested in Crowley and/or Wilson, GRAB it. Like most books by Wilson, there is almost as much information about the author as there is about the subject. He tells how he became interested in Crowley and the occult, gives his views on other writers' studies, etc. Some readers may be annoyed by that, but with such a controversial subject it is really refreshing, honest, and one has few doubts about where Wilson is coming from. He started as a sceptic but years of study turned him into a semi-believer in occult phenomena. He therefore respects much of what Crowley tried to do while also pointing out the areas where he feels Crowley's personality prevented him from taking his experiments and creative activities further. You may disagree here and there but but will be very entertained, stimulated, and well-informed. Plus the book is rather short, and leaves you wanting more ... and so after reading this (if you enjoy it), you should go on to "The Occult" by Wilson, plus "Perdurabo" by Kaczynski and "A Magick Life" by Booth, two more detailed biographical studies of Crowley, and/or his own "Confessions." Plus Crowley's many magickal studies. But this is a good place to start because it is neither worshipful nor disdainful.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Worthwhile Treatment of a Difficult Subject, September 18, 2011
Colin Wilson's book on Aleister Crowley is one of the best I have read on the subject. "The Nature of the Beast" does a good job of showing Crowley's merits and demerits. Unfortunately, by any objective measure, the latter outweigh the former. But this does not mean that Crowley was a mere mountebank, as Wilson suggested in his book "The Occult." To quote W. Somerset Maugham, Crowley was "not entirely a fake." There really was something to his philosophy, and Wilson does his best to tease that something out. Wilson spends most of the book describing successive chapters of Crowley's life, with occasional asides about his philosophy and writings. In the last chapter, Wilson sums up his view of Crowley and his legacy. This book does not go into great depth describing Crowley's philosophy, magical system, or the evolution of his ideas, which I would have appreciated. Instead, the book reads like a short biography with a bit of philosophy thrown in. I was most pleased with Wilson's excerpting some of Crowley's best writing. The man could write, sometimes, and his very best poems and essays would not be out of place in an Oxford anthology. Wilson also gives a sample of Crowley's less stellar works, showing Crowley's view of himself as one of England's best poets as, shall we say, a tad hyperbolic. Overall, this book is worthwhile reading; for a book barely over 100 pages, it has a lot of interesting and thought-provoking material. But it is not the book that it could be, or that Mr. Wilson is capable of writing.
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4 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
This isn't a book is a book unreadable!!!!!!!!, April 20, 2007
It's a book report- slapped together by an obsequious, schoolboy, establishment, apple polisher. It is an appalling effort that reveals more about the sad state of current U.K. publishing than it does about its subject matter. There's no photos in COLIN WILSON Nature of beast, so all eager Crowley bio readers are advised to get Sandy Robertson's «Aleister Crowley Scrapbook» as a visual side-dish. Truly,it is apparent, "no bad book shall go unpublished". And no more truer, when it happens to be a dreadful, pious and nauseatingly moralistic account of the late great Master Therion (Aleister Crowley). A book not should be able the reader to understand Crowley and learn from his ideas. THE WORST BOOK EVER WRITEN!!!A BOOK UNREADABLE!!!!!!!!
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