Doesn’t matter when I aquired them or how, just that I read them in 2009
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I breezed through this little tome in a week, even sneaking in reads at work. It is for me a very useful book that I expect to keep and draw upon as I continue my quest to achieve my goals and ambitions. Every chapter seemed to resonate with me both in describing faults in my process, and being ideas I can undertake to improve. I especially liked the new approach MJ Ryan seems to take to the Law of Attraction. She’s less convinced that some great universal ATM is out there just waiting to dump cash on those who will only believe enough, be grateful enough, envision enough… Her suggestions drive much more of the LOA principles as being grounded in the will and desire of each person to achieve things for themselves. I liked this book and will keep it handy for rereading.
This book took me way longer to read than it should have, and I have to be honest, I nearly gave up halfway through. I am glad I stuck it out, though. I don’t agree with every conclusion the book draws, and I grew a little weary of the depiction of Mortenson as a “can-do-no-wrong super-wonderful, greatest guy who ever lived”. He has made terrific sacrifices, he has faced dangerous situations for alturistic purposes, he has done good work. He has also been selfish and self-aggrandizing in the most humble ways. By refusing to accept help from others who offered he set back the development of his own agency by years. By ignoring the work of others who were successfully doing the same work around the world he tied his own hands, then complained about it. He worked himself into a rut by looking at his own feet, not the footsteps of others. And if one more person had related a story of his undiluted goodness and caring, extoling his virtues and remarking for the 150th time “I’ve never met anyone like him”…
That said the the story telling is remarkably flat and plods along with no sense of timing or suspense. We see Mortensen’s world through the very narrow prisim of his own vision, literally “one school at a time”. It is a story that is as strongly phrased for its public relations value as a book about one man’s struggle to make a difference. And will he have made a difference? Can it be judged in a year, or decades? However, it is good to read a tale about someone who saw something wrong, something he though needed fixing, and then went and did it. He didn’t just talk, he didn’t extole, he didn’t write an article. He didn’t try to fix the whole world, he fixed what he could. He gave of himself, his time and his money, and fixed the one thing he could. That is the lesson I take from this book.
I bought this book at a used bookstore, sold on the back-flap description. It started slow, had no pacing, became more ridiculous with every page, and failed to produce even one character I could sympathize with. Whether it was the author or the editor who was responsible for the extremely annoying phrasing, it did not help the story at all. The constant need to italizise, and punctuate every other phrase with an exclamation mark! made me feel I was reading someone’s bad first draft. It read like a poor attempt at writing a novel that is meant to go straight to screenplay.
This is a big, thick, well paced pulp publication hitting on all the main themes of the Law of Attraction. It lays things out very simply without a lot of extisential crap and makes a good primer for anyone newly introduced to the subject. Its tone is somewhat clinical, so it won’t get someone all worked up the way “The Secret” does. But it provides grounded information that people new to the practice can use and build on.
I bought this book 10 years ago when the movie “The Ninth Gate” came out. I find myself re-reading it at least once a year. Arturo’s other books haven’t wowed me as much or given me that feel of old Europe and mystery I get from this one. I may, once my Spanish improves dramatically, get a hardback copy in the original language and see how I enjoy that.
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