Author: Peter Hazel
Trade Paperback, 223 pages
Publisher: Llewellyn
Publication date: September 2001
ISBN: 1567184103
Price & More Info: Click Here
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In the late 1960s, I spent most of my allowance one week to get a thick paperback book entitled The Complete Illustrated Book of the Psychic Sciences. One of the chapters in this book was on palmistry. I found the subject fascinating. Unfortunately, while there were some illustrations, there were not nearly enough for such a visual subject, so I never could actually learn palmistry from this book. If I could have had Peter Hazel's new Palmistry Quick & Easy thirty years ago, I might have grown up to be a palm reader.
The major part of Hazel's book is a step-by-step guide to reading a hand, complete with enough illustrations to make the text clear and usable. This guide consists of 300 or so things to look for on the hand, presented as questions like "Is the thumb... ...Long? ...Medium? ...Short? ...Quite stiff, inflexible, and unyielding? ...Rather supple and flexible?" Each question is accompanied by a paragraph or two of interpretation for when the answer is "yes." The illustrations usually make exactly what you are looking for very clear. There are about 165 pages of these questions, answers and illustrations to work through when examining a hand. With practice, the author claims that one will need to refer to the book less and less. I can't personally attest to that claim, but I can say that I found actually reading a hand to be a relatively easy, if time-consuming, task with this book.
There is a bit of history, theory, and methodology at the beginning of this book in a section entitled "Notes." There's also an interesting section at the end of the book explaining how palmistry can be used by astrologers, parents, personnel managers, and marriage counselors. This is followed by a brief description of other methods of viewing the hand, including the traditional one from medieval texts.
Palmistry Quick & Easy is an excellent book for anyone interested in learning how to read hands. If you are interested in palmistry but, like me, have found other books lacking because you need good illustrations -- and lots of them -- to be able to tell a life line from a bee line, this book definitely deserves a place on your shelves.
Reviewed by Randall
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