This book is harsh. Very, very harsh. The author was not only a specialist and advanced practitioner of magic, but also a strict atheist and materialist who interpreted magic as a set of yet to be properly discovered physical principles and laws. You'll find no fluff here. This is a hard, almost scientific theorization on how magic might work, with some small practical examples (if you think a "kill spell" is small) added for good measure.
And, boy, isn't the author angry? He despises and criticizes to no end everyone he considers charlatans:
* Religions? He deconstructs them showing how their rites fit within his theory of magic, hence concluding they're just so many additional schools of magic;
* Gods? Useful tools the mage creates (yes, creates) as focus points, but ultimately unreal;
* Spirits? Blobs of memories stored in our collective unconscious that living people can tap into;
* Phantoms? Those same memories, animated by a living person doing unconscious magic;
* Souls? No, you're dead, you're gone.
Some aspects of the book are dated, mainly its reliance on 1970's research that for one reason or another went nowhere, its predictions about how the world of magical research would be shaped by the 2000's but weren't, and its "Switchboard" theory of the collective unconscious, which is well behind the current state of the art in information theory. But those are minor problems. The actually important stuff is still as mind blowing as when the book was written, and worth the price alone.
If someday in the future magic is proven true and a physical "thing" no different than electricity or nuclear forces, this book will be looked back as the starting point in that revolution. If not, well, it was a good try. In either case, get it and be prepared to have your entire belief set challenged.
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