Customer Reviews

Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

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I find Ghostly Matters a brilliant, useful, and (hauntingly) beautiful book. I especially appreciate the way Gordon brings together ostensibly disparate approaches and subjects (sociology and literary studies, the material and the spiritual, Argentina's "disappeared" and slavery in the U.S., and different kinds of writing in her own text) to call into question our conventional ways of seeing, to bring back those whom History and "just the Facts, ma'am" have tried to bury or relegate to permanent shadow. I'm going to give this book as a holiday present to everyone I love who hasn't read it already.

Quibble (as many well) with the specifics of particular examples, or the choice of them, Gordon's crucial conceptual leap is to explain the supernatural in terms of the psychology of anxiety, hallucination, and ultimately, religion and myth. Her work adds a critical, and unifying, piece to the work of Joseph Campbell, Sigmund Freud and others which ultimately go to the underlying workings of the human mind and the bases of consciousness.

As a reader with two graduate degrees from brick and mortar universities (CUA, JHU) I also felt the book was pretentious and wordy, for the sake perhaps of adding word count to a dissertation. I thought the material was unnecessarily dense, even though otherwise valid or interesting. This was one of the few books that I have thrown out.

this book arrived in great shape, like new, and very quickly! would purchase from this seller again.

This book is meant for an upper level college student or a graduate student education. It is not about ghosts as much as it is about how the correlation between memories and photographs are types of ghostly experiences, haunting experiences of our own pasts. It is wordy and pretentious. The writer says in an entire chapter which anyone could say in two to three paragraphs. The more she writes the more circles she draws around her points and the less clear he point becomes. Unless you are a psychology major or you want to waste your free time.