The Book of Answers: Getting Wise in a Wisdom-Crazy World: Field Notes on Getting Wise in a Wisdom-crazy World

by Ptolemy Tompkins

Book Overview

A survivor of the New Age offers a provocative and challenging cultural expose on the contemporary quest to attain and keep spiritual wisdom. Print features. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0747544476
• Release Date: August 2001
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.7" x 5.4"

Customer Reviews

saved by the last chapter

Mostly a rather silly romp through a handful of life philosophies on the premise that there is an esoteric path to enlightenment, and the job is to keep trying one after the other until you find the one that works for you. After taking some time (most of the book)setting up this straw man, Tompkins knocks it over convincingly. Until I got to the last chapter I was fully prepared to be very disappointed. That chapter takes a very good shot at answering the question, "what's it all about?" If you are looking for insights, wrap the Huxley quote, the Hun Tun story, and the highway/service road analogy up together and give yourself a treat. Its a lesson on Buddah's "middle way", and skillfully the author avoids the label. Its an important book for anyone like myself who has been attracted to the lonely detour of wisdom.

Don't try to drive!

The basic desire to have an answer is one shared by all.Tompkins isn't satisfied with "hand me down" answers and sets out to find one of his own.Like many of us his need for an answer leads him to those who have professed to have one....and like many of us he becomes disenchanted with the results of his search.Somehow many of these searches for wisdom have one similarity, it is " a process" . Management of this process,by lack of acceptance,compulsion,denial or self-absorption.....doesn't work.