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In 1926, C. G. Jung visited Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico, whose chief said, “How can there be another god? Nothing can be without the sun.” Nineteen years later and some sixty miles away, on land appropriated by the US government from the Ildefonso Pueblo, the Los Alamos National Laboratory was built. Here the first atomic bombs were designed and constructed. Then, in the summer of 1945, the first nuclear device was tested in the desert of southern New Mexico, lighting “a thousand suns.” In The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico, Joseph Masco, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, offers a unique ethnographic analysis of the people and land that was appropriated for the birthplace and continued research and development of nuclear weapons that have prompted, along with global warming, the so-called Doomsday Clock to be set at two minutes to oblivion.

This collection of Joseph Campbell's essays, spanning nearly thirty years, reflects his originality, wit, and range as a student of mythology and ethnography and as a consummate teacher. It offers a sample of essays by the iconic teacher of mythology that fall into two major categories: Mythology and History, and Mythology and the Arts. The book opens with a talk Campbell gave on what and how he taught during his thirty-eight-year tenure at Sarah Lawrence College, the then experimental women's college located in Bronxville, NY. I chose three of the ten essays, discussing a few of what I see as weaknesses in Campbell's arguments, some of which can be allotted to progress the natural sciences have made since the essays were written and Campbell's death twenty-one years ago. I suggest that this is an important collection, one that offers an array of information on, and insights into, world mythology and human creativity, written with erudition in a style that is accessible to both the lay reader and...

Myoe Koben (1173–1232) was born into the Yuasa family in the Arita district of Kii, Japan. He was ordained into two Buddhist sects: Kegon, the Japanese version of the Chinese Hua-yen, and Shingon, a tantric sect related in spirit to the Tibetan Vajrayana. He also practiced zazen, Zen meditation, which scholar of religions George J. Tanabe, Jr., in his book on Myoe, misrepresents as a practice one does “to have visions.” 1 In fact, according to Eihei Dogen, the great Zen Master and philosopher who was Myoe’s contemporary, the purpose of zazen is to “drop body and mind.” Nevertheless, Myoe’s soteriological practices seem to have had a more visionary intention. A scholarly monk, Myoe wrote over fifty works in several genres, including philosophical treatises, letters, travel journals, and poetry. Although Myoe was abbot of Kozanji, a Kegon monastery, Mark Unno points out that Myoe devoted the last decade of his life to Shingon Buddhism’s “Mantra of Light.” Under the title, The Sutra of the Mantra of the Unfailing Rope Snare of the Buddha Vairocana’s Great Baptism, the mantra was brought to Japan from China around 300 years before Myoe’s birth. But it was he who brought it into practice. I first learned of Myoe when, in the early 1990s, I came across