What do you think?
Rate this book
The Secret Life of Money: How Money Can Be Food for the Soul
The Secret Life of Money lifts the veils surrounding one of our most ubiquitous creations. Tad Crawford delves into ancient tales and modern events, from King Midas to the birth of the credit card, uncovering the sources of our firmly rooted and unexamined assumptions about money by laying bare its history, mythology, and psychology. Crawford shows how dispelling illusions about what money does and what it has to offer not only will free our minds, but will guide us toward lasting values. And since so many human transactions are based on the exchange of currency, understanding our relationship to money can clarify our connection to other people and to our communities. The Secret Life of Money is a journey which will serve as a tool in interpreting how money talks and what it has to say.
304 pages, Paperback
First published October 10, 1994
5 people are currently reading
552 people want to read
About the author
Tad Crawford
86 books78 followersMy new novel, A Woman in the Wild, has just been published by Arcade Publishing (distributed by Simon & Schuster).
The novel tells of Thea, a psychologist in crisis who leaves her established practice in the city for an open-ended retreat in the mountains at the Institute for Healing and Transformation. Feeling lost, betrayed, and stricken by guilt not to have saved her daughter from sexual abuse, she hopes to find a new path to ease her pain and uncertainties. Soon after her arrival, a “wild” man who roamed the forest with a bear is brought to the institute. When the man is given to her care, she performs a suspenseful balancing as she seeks to heal him as well as herself. Hiking and meditating each day, she initiates an inner journey that shakes her free from the familiar. As the months pass, she engages her guilt and sorrow, confronts her failures, weighs the limits of therapy and self-forgiveness, and seeks to unleash the healing powers of the unconscious and of love.
I'm happy to do book clubs and library talks about the novel.
The novel tells of Thea, a psychologist in crisis who leaves her established practice in the city for an open-ended retreat in the mountains at the Institute for Healing and Transformation. Feeling lost, betrayed, and stricken by guilt not to have saved her daughter from sexual abuse, she hopes to find a new path to ease her pain and uncertainties. Soon after her arrival, a “wild” man who roamed the forest with a bear is brought to the institute. When the man is given to her care, she performs a suspenseful balancing as she seeks to heal him as well as herself. Hiking and meditating each day, she initiates an inner journey that shakes her free from the familiar. As the months pass, she engages her guilt and sorrow, confronts her failures, weighs the limits of therapy and self-forgiveness, and seeks to unleash the healing powers of the unconscious and of love.
I'm happy to do book clubs and library talks about the novel.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 23, 2010
I've referred to this book several times since reading it. I love knowing the history of "money" and the psychological and spiritual forces that give it power.
March 31, 2022
Having just finished THE SECRET LIFE OF MONEY (“TSLOM”), I now want to share this life-enriching experience of a book immediately with friends, colleagues, even the journalists I follow – and this is not my typical reaction to a book, even the ones I love – they get 4 or 5 stars on Amazon or Goodreads. Period.
TSLOM takes you on a delightfully profound and absorbing journey of discovery in which you’ll explore the many roles and meanings that ‘money’ holds, beyond the practical, deep within our personal psyche and within the collective psyche of our culture – in fact of many culturesand civilizations down through human history. Amazingly yet efforlessly, the author retells the tales, myths and fables as he leads you through the hidden and/or buried meaning of money across time and civilizations. To do this he draws from his daunting study and understanding of myths and legends, world history and world religions, anthropology texts, Jungian psychology and not least of all, a helpful bit on archetypes. I was awestruck by the sheer breadth and depth of knowledge the author amassed to write this book with the goal of broadening the reader’s understanding and insights in a most inviting and non-pedantic way. The book doesn’t have exhaustive and exhausting footnotes and references on the bottom third of each page; instead the author provides that detail in the 33page section of ‘Notes’ and ‘Bibliography’ at the back plus 11 page Index. Just in case you do want to take a more scholarly dive after all you’ve absorbed so far!
Upon finishing it, I pondered how to get even more from the bookbeyond just re-reading – these insights just must be shared. In a perfect world I’d share and discuss it with my own personal diverse book club group consisting of specialists such as a Jungian psychologist, anthopologist, an orthodox priest, a rabbi, a scholar of folklore/mythology, a student of world history. And me. And maybe Joseph Campbell if he were still around.
It could be worth mentioning what this book is not since it might be hard for retailers like Amazon to categorize.
--If you are looking for a book of therapy psycho-babble about how your fear of dying penniless despite aan advanced education and Wall Street job is tied to your parents’ four bankruptcies before you were 12, this is not the book.
--If you seek more insights into better managing your personal finances, or need a deeper dive to bolster the typical MBA Finance course topics – say, behavioral finance or the inner workings of central banks and the money supply – TSLOM isn’t offering that.
I might have been hoping for a teeny tiny bit in those two areas, but was instead utterly delighted to be taken on a journey to discover the profound richness of money’s meaning and symbolism deep in our psyche and running through our species’ vaste cultural histories. At the end, you’ll likely want to reread ‘The Wizard of Oz‘.
TSLOM takes you on a delightfully profound and absorbing journey of discovery in which you’ll explore the many roles and meanings that ‘money’ holds, beyond the practical, deep within our personal psyche and within the collective psyche of our culture – in fact of many culturesand civilizations down through human history. Amazingly yet efforlessly, the author retells the tales, myths and fables as he leads you through the hidden and/or buried meaning of money across time and civilizations. To do this he draws from his daunting study and understanding of myths and legends, world history and world religions, anthropology texts, Jungian psychology and not least of all, a helpful bit on archetypes. I was awestruck by the sheer breadth and depth of knowledge the author amassed to write this book with the goal of broadening the reader’s understanding and insights in a most inviting and non-pedantic way. The book doesn’t have exhaustive and exhausting footnotes and references on the bottom third of each page; instead the author provides that detail in the 33page section of ‘Notes’ and ‘Bibliography’ at the back plus 11 page Index. Just in case you do want to take a more scholarly dive after all you’ve absorbed so far!
Upon finishing it, I pondered how to get even more from the bookbeyond just re-reading – these insights just must be shared. In a perfect world I’d share and discuss it with my own personal diverse book club group consisting of specialists such as a Jungian psychologist, anthopologist, an orthodox priest, a rabbi, a scholar of folklore/mythology, a student of world history. And me. And maybe Joseph Campbell if he were still around.
It could be worth mentioning what this book is not since it might be hard for retailers like Amazon to categorize.
--If you are looking for a book of therapy psycho-babble about how your fear of dying penniless despite aan advanced education and Wall Street job is tied to your parents’ four bankruptcies before you were 12, this is not the book.
--If you seek more insights into better managing your personal finances, or need a deeper dive to bolster the typical MBA Finance course topics – say, behavioral finance or the inner workings of central banks and the money supply – TSLOM isn’t offering that.
I might have been hoping for a teeny tiny bit in those two areas, but was instead utterly delighted to be taken on a journey to discover the profound richness of money’s meaning and symbolism deep in our psyche and running through our species’ vaste cultural histories. At the end, you’ll likely want to reread ‘The Wizard of Oz‘.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews