2004-11-10 An exellent starting point.

With so many "introduction" books flooding the market these days it can be difficult to know where the best place is to even start when interested in difficult subject. In my experience it has been the Very Short Introduction series that offers the most effective presentation of key ideas to particular thinkers. The modesty of these books (unwilling to claim that they are going to introduce you to anything more than an absolute basic) is not to be misunderstood, this series is far more effective than Icons more popular Introducing... series, there are no cartoons here and it's written in a traditional chapter, sub-section style of an academic text book. The books though are so readable and clear, there is a totally unpretentious quality to them and clear examples and elaborations of key ideas. I read the Introducing Jung sometime ago and it sparked an interest, I even bought some of his books but still I found them difficult to grasp, this book however left a much clearer imprint of Jungian ideas and I can now tackle some of his original works. The series only drawback is it lacks some topics available in icons range, I would dearly love to see a Very Short Introduciton to Lacan, or Levi-Strauss, hopefully in yhe near future. I whole heartedly recommend these books, you learn more as the 150 so pages are pretty much text instead of drawings and text bubbles and yet the readability means while they take more time to just read through (most say they read an Introducing book in an hour, it might take you two or three to read these) you actually grasp the ideas more quickly.