A relentlessly positive and often convoluted message that will appeal mostly to Chopra’s core audience.
A heady prescription for maximum self-awareness.
Bestselling author and alternative medicine advocate Chopra (What Are You Hungry For?, 2013, etc.) continues his enlightenment crusade with a narrative encouraging readers to reach “beyond the mechanical side of life” and the limitations of their lives in order to “occupy metareality.” The author believes metareality to be the source of all creativity; to become awakened to it and move “beyond the illusion” of everyday perception is to become metahuman, which he equates to “tuning in to the whole radio band instead of one narrow channel.” Fans of Chopra’s spiritual enlightenment philosophies will digest these new dictums easily; others will find it difficult to sift through the great amount of referential supporting material. The text is a stew packed with discussions of neuroscience concepts, mystical Indian poetry, ego examination, psychedelic drug therapy, and discussions of how the “inflated promises” of religion “have lost their power to inspire devotion.” Chopra’s research and dedication to this mind-expanding field are impressive, but the resulting narrative is dizzying and frequently overwhelming. The author incorporates multiple-choice questionnaires, wakefulness exercises, and surveys into the text, and he diminishes his message with frequent subject detours and digressive commentary—specifically, the daily plan at the end, “31 Metahuman Lessons,” which seems separate from the core narrative’s message. Readers who are willing to wade through the dross will find pages of helpful direction on how to focus attention on improving one’s sense of worth and purpose. As always, Chopra’s main focus and intention are self-improvement and untapped personal potential and the discovery of new ways to live beyond current self-imposed limitations. Here, readers are required to make more of an investment of time and thought on a life plan that puts a new spin on more conventional spiritual interpretations of consciousness and reality.
A relentlessly positive and often convoluted message that will appeal mostly to Chopra’s core audience.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-307-33833-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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