In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” Karl Marx famously wrote that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Nowadays, history repeats itself as a middlebrow package: the TV mini-series with its “tie-in” book. Bill Moyers’s Healing and the Mind is a model of the genre.¹ The tie-in rests safely near the top of the Times best-seller list (twenty-four weeks as I write), not far beneath a Jungian analyst’s Women Who Run With the Wolves (fifty-one weeks) and Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought to Be (forty-six weeks).

Moyers’s volume is more a product than a book; in years past, one called these volumes “ooks.” It has been edited by Betty Sue Flowers, a poet and professor of English at the University of Texas, who previously helped Moyers with the tie-in to his series on Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth. In an introductory note, she thanks Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, one of her heroes, for “vision and encouragement.” Moyers thanks the Fetzer Institute, as well he might. Since many of the doctors and scientists he interviewed were supported by the John E. Fetzer Institute, as was the series itself, one anticipates a congruence of views.

Moyers’s volume is more a product than a book; in years past, one called these volumes “ooks.”

The book consists of a series of