John Carroll - John Carroll is a professor in the department of sociology at La Trobe University, who gained his PhD at Cambridge.
He has written extensively on themes social and spiritual, most famously in his books Terror - a Meditation on the Meaning of September 11 and The Wreck of Western Culture - Humanism Revisited.
Clive Hamilton - Clive Hamilton is a prolific writer and public commentator and immediate past Executive Director of The Australia Institute. He comments on community standards, public moral codes, and limits to freedom of expression.
In this substantially revised edition of Ego and Soul, John Carroll examines the battlegrounds across which a struggle for meaning is being fought -- including work, sport, intimacy, the university, shopping, tourism, computers, democracy, and a retreat into nature.
On the one side, depressive pessimism, rancour, and disenchantment have arisen, accompanied by rampant consumerism. The upper-middle-class elites, with their high culture, have lost their way.
On the other side, much of what people still do disguises a search for meaning.
Groping unconsciously for direction, inhabitants of the modern West are even, in their ordinary and everyday lives, casting lines into the transcendent in the hope of a catch.
And there is success.
Ego and Soul offers a surprising and compelling new look at the way we live today, and the way we try to make sense of our lives- gleebooks
This guy is a depressed fool. 10-20 years in his field, who knows how many books published, and THIS is the peak of his articulation on a subject near and dear to his heart. :P