The book about Mark Twain by Ron Waters was terrific. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Mark Twain in detail and at a depth that was sometimes stunning. I was awed by the level of detail that Ron Waters seemed to have completely mastered about every aspect of Twain’s life. I know Twain has been a focus of dozens of biographers, and that there’s tremendous archival information about him, so there’s a lot of data to plow through, sort out, and talk about. But Waters put it all back together very well. He also did an excellent job of staying in chronological sequence, so the time track of Twain’s life is not all mixed up, but clearly laid out and easy to follow.

It’s a book based on a project that attempts to bring pathos to the everyday lives of average people, by interviewing them about their lives, recording their answers, and saving it for posterity as “history”. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but it’s not like Dianetics, where listening to them actually helps them get better. The people running this project have no technology for actually helping people. An experienced and knowledgeable listener (”auditor” in Dianetics terms) would actually have helped these people become more able. Instead they just let them ramble - you could occasionally “hear” some of the phrases that these people were using — a Dianetic auditor would have had them repeat these phrases until the incident (containing pain and unconsciousness or loss) that these phrases came from was revealed to them.

In any event, I couldn’t finish reading the book — some of these people were in real pain and no one was helping them. Knowing what we know of Dianetics, it was gruesome, like listening to psychiatrists chop up communication from their patients and evaluate for them.

As one who has received a lot of Dianetic auditing (counseling) over the years, I can say that the techniques work exactly as advertised.