JFK, RFK, MLK, Lincoln, John Lennon, and a host of others speak from beyond death in this engaging series of purported...
A meditation on the afterlife constructed as a series of conversations with an array of dead people, from the very famous to the entirely ordinary.
Through their working collaboration—Michael taking messages from the beyond and Talbot writing them up and appending open-ended questions to facilitate discussion—the authors offer an account of a busy, hopeful afterlife populated by spirits who would universally prefer to be there rather than back in their earthly lives. “Not all will believe these spirit messages, but we ask you to suspend judgment until you have read the book,” Talbot writes. The conversations, presented as a series of encounters, are with a range of people, from famous dead U.S. presidents and celebrities to everyday people, all grouped into three categories: those who died unexpectedly and suddenly, those who had a bit of forewarning, and those who grappled with terminal illnesses that allowed months and sometimes years in which to prepare for death. Nine-year-old Lily, who died suddenly of a “brain seizure,” assures Michael that “living in spirit is not that much different from being alive as a human.” The spirit of President John F. Kennedy is asked what really happened in Dallas that day: “the shot that killed me came from an angry man in front of me—back and to the left.” Sometimes, touchingly, these spirits seem a bit lonely for their old lives: young Lily says, “I can easily share more,” and an old friend of the writer says, “Talk to me; tell me something funny!” But the general message is clearly one of hope in a warm, embracing Christian afterlife, a place of great comfort and peace from which the dead watch over the living. Fans of John Edward and other such afterlife mediums will enjoy it quite readily.
JFK, RFK, MLK, Lincoln, John Lennon, and a host of others speak from beyond death in this engaging series of purported afterlife conversations.Pub Date: June 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5122-8271-9
Page Count: 168
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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