Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Poor Franz Hartmann. The "editor" of this book has taken a text known to be by Franz Hartmann (1838-1912), silently merged different editions of that text, "modernized" the language in other unspecified ways, and then (hand, scratching head) attributed the result (which is hers and hers alone) to Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), because (as far as I can tell), she misunderstood a single comment of Hartmann's (which the editor of this text misquotes) in the later edition of Hartmann's text. Hartmann writes, c. 1910, that "[t]he following account of a psychic experience has been gathered from notes handed to me by a friend, a writer of considerable repute." The editor of this edition drops the opening of that quote, decides on the basis of no evidence that "a friend, a writer of considerable repute" is Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and attributes Hartmann's text to Blavatsky. Incomprehensible. For the record, the "...friend [and] writer of considerable repute..." mentioned by Hartmann is more likely to be Carl du Prel (1839-1899) than Blavatsky, whom Hartmann viewed with distrust by the time the second edition of his text was published in 1910. STUDENTS: don't use this text; it's corrupted in ways only the editor knows (since she didn't bother to note her "modernizations' or other changes). READERS: Choose Hartmann's original, *With the Adepts* (1910), which is out of copyright and available from a variety of public sources. AMAZON: If this book were a food or a drug, it would be fraudulent and dangerous to consume. Please remove it from your shelves.