Entertaining but lightweight recap of one man’s spiritual quest.
A memoir purporting to save us from those who would save us.
Less a life story than a series of essays, this book is a Santa Fe Trail mix of New Age, Eastern and Native American spiritual influences. A Southerner now living in New Mexico, Odom has been a priest, a columnist for the Santa Fe Reporter and a counselor. He comes out swinging against those who blindly follow traditional religion or seek instant enlightenment through “microwave spirituality.” The book comes vibrantly to life in the chapter “Looking for God in All the Wrong Places,” which takes the author from his Mississippi roots to life as a gay seminarian, to burning his vestments and leaving the church. The final essay is the most revelatory and firmly establishes the author’s credibility–which may have readers wondering why it appears so late in the book. Along the way, readers will chuckle at the character Crystal Starchild, who channels a lisping hairdresser named Bruce. While Odom’s work is amusing, he seesaws between advising readers to find their own truths and exhorting them to take his advice. Similarly, he writes early on that he doesn’t believe in Jesus, though he later discusses Jesus’ teachings. The author wishes to be a spiritual teacher, yet many concepts he touches upon–using positive affirmations, perceiving money as energy and examining core beliefs–are plumbed to greater depths in dozens of other texts. One of Odom’s intriguing techniques is diagramming life experiences like diagramming a sentence. An explanation or graphic would be a bonus here, but readers won’t find either. He discusses regression sessions as a means for releasing karmic blockages and explains his conclusions about past-life experiences, but doesn’t explain how long this process took. This sampling of wisdom, while tasty, doesn’t quite make a meal.
Entertaining but lightweight recap of one man’s spiritual quest.Pub Date: March 22, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4196-6214-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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