Alex To Books

Expectations: I was expecting this to be sort of an encyclopedia of different ideas, concepts, and organizations within the New Age movement. It'd be sort of basic, like how "Positive Magic" is for Paganism, just introducing the ideas and then telling you were to go to learn more if you're interested. I'm having to stumble my way through a variety of New Age topics, almost none of which introduce themselves. (Quite the opposite of Paganism topics, where introductions abound in greater number than any further extrapolations.) All of them seem to assume you already know how all these things connect, so they rush on foward, and by the end of the book you're still not completely sure what they meant.

Actual result: The book is... well, it is a dictionary. It has the exact same thickness, arrangement, and formatting as a college pocket dictionary, with the same briefness of entries. Many of the entries are actually people's names (authors, or characters in books.) Entries for words mentioned in many languages (such as "life energy" or "peace") are followed with a list of how various languages call it. It's... well, this book is useless to me. It has the same lack of introduction or direction that I've seen in any other New Age books.

This book was made from a tesis presentend by the author following 9/11. There's a lot of curious informations,much literature "hollow" speaking but very few considerations about each writer's point of view and, especially, doesn't have a clear link about modern terrorism and literature. It's a poor work and you finish the book without realizing what the author means with it, but I have one bet: just to be the first one to say something (anything) about the matter, and seems "deep" and "intelligent" with nonsense considerations. If you want something really good and useful about the matter, try The Modern Library "Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent", it bears a introduction and a posface full of good information and the subjects terrorism and literature ARE deeply linked. And it's cheaper!

I found the first 25-30 pages interesting and enlightening, then gradually lost interest, although there are some bright spots on pages 30-334. Don't get me wrong, it's worth reading, but it gets somewhat tedious as you move through the book.

I came across this book as I find my name mentioned in a paragraph which says I became "wealthy" from managing a bbs forum on Prodigy. No, not really. No, not at all. No. Not even remotely. Not even, well off. Really offensive such a bald error.
So, judging from the misinformation about me....wonder about the book.
But, we all make mistakes?

The first 21 pages are interesting reading. If it ended there, the author would have a decent magazine article. But the text goes on adding very little to the first couple of chapters. The chapter on "the uninym" is a curiosity. I can't figure out how it supports the main claims. The chapter on generation and class unearths tired generalizations (I still don't understand how someone born in late-1957 is a baby boomer. I didn't give a damn about Vietnam or the Haight, but only about queues for gasoline.) Parts 2-5 of the book, the examples of the author's overall claims about propaganda, barely support the claims at all, instead indulging in descriptive and biographical information that is incidental to the claim. More to the point, the book is full of errors. Just a sample in case you're interested. Marshall McLuhan would be astonished to learn that he described TV as a hot medium and print as cold (p. 28). Everytime I feel I can explain McLuhan like a master, someone has to write something like this! The music chapters alone would have my students reeling: e.g., The Red Hot Chili Peppers are not a Seattle band (p. 108); they're from LA. REM was not poised to be the successor to Nirvana (p. 112); they made it big a decade earlier. "Shattered" was not a Rolling Stones commentary on the successes of the 80s (p. 124); I was playing it as a UCLA undergrad in 1978 . . . it's on the Some Girls album. The wordsmith of Bikini Kill is not Kathi Wilson (p. 127) but Kathleen Hanna.

I loved Bill McFarlan's "Drop The Pink Elephant," but "Are You Good Enough" is simply unpleasant to read and contains very little useful information.

The book is based on a story about a ficititious couple and their son. Each chapter begins with an event in their lives (for example, the wife overeating while waiting for her husband to get home from work), and attempts to tie that into a couple of pages of text explaining how (in this instance) the wife is overeating because she's really hungry for love.

Unfortunately, the only way in which this book made me feel more self-confident and/or better about myself is the knowledge that my own books actually contain useful information, laid out in steps that can easily be followed by anyone.

Overall, "Are You Good Enough" is a huge disappointment.

This one fits into that rare category which is a WASTE of money. The title is catchy but that is as far as it goes.

This book was a complete waste of time unless you are actually a trained buddist. It's a bunch of non-sensical stuff that means nothing to the layman.

We got this book as a gift for our honeymoon. I guess we're lucky, but most of the stuff in here we'd already dreamed up on our own and the things that we wanted to do, we'd done. Sorry, but we were wanting romantic things, not necessarily directions to have (ahem) 'marital relations' in a public place, or in our car. I was very disappointed. At one point, we just started tearing through the sealed cards, just to see if there was anything we hadn't tried. We lugged this thing to Europe for our honeymoon, and should have left it there.