"An Alchemy of Mind" proved to be a major let down. Its sparkling review in People Magazine led me to believe that this would be a review of psychological research written in an entertaining fashion. Neither was shown to be the case. I soon found that Diane Ackerman had minimal previous experience with psychological findings . . . her credit was that she was an English professor. As a result, her writing was so filled with cliche and metaphor that it made me want to vom. Every sentence contained some sort of cheesy word play and nearly every other sentence contained the word "yen." I don't have a yen for the overuse of such a word.Part of the problem could be that I have a degree in psychology. This provided nothing new or interesting. Chapters were disjointed . . . simply a conglomeration of a bunch of essays. Poetic, maybe . . . informative, hardly.