Customer Reviews

Reich for Beginners

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Reich is little-known, not surprisingly as he achieved nothing much. His book 'Listen, Little Man' however was liked by some people whose views deserve respect. As far as I could find, it's not mentioned in Mairowitz and Gonzales' comic illustrations book.

The format is unusual and there's no reason for it not to work. I don't think it does here because, with tedious inevitability, this is just another Jewish/USA book. Throughout there's the usual stuff about Nazis, Hitler starting the war (in fact, Britain declared war on Hitler), omission of the effects of the First World War. In the USA, the Rosenbergs are referred to a 'so-called 'Atom-Spies'', Joe McCarthy is a baddy, and all the rest.

Reich was Austrian and resembled Freud in some of his ideas, notably the sex bits - 'sexual revolution' I suppose being based on the 'Russian Revolution'. Reich seems to have made money as a therapist and author; all this is not very clear (and may not be known for certain, of course). Later in life Reich became a pseudo-scientist, in both biology and physics: for example he thought up an 'orgone accumulator' - like many people, he constructed beliefs around the word 'energy'. He devised what he apparently believed to be a rain making machine - this cartoon book implies that it worked, which cannot be correct. By this time he was in the USA, and there was FDA action against him; he felt and perhaps was a victim - it's hard to judge and the effort of ploughing through court transcripts is off-putting.

Reich deserves a small book, but it would need a sympathetic understanding of Jews, wars, mass propaganda, science, and the psychology of getting science wrong. This book isn't it.