Great Society's Poor Law: A New Approach to Poverty - Sar A. Levitan - Hardcover Book

Having finished the short "Napoleon Hill's Keys to Success", the medium sized "Think and Grow Rich" and the massive "The Law of Success" all back to back, and having found them all fairly similar, I will discuss them all at once.

First of all, "Napoleon Hill's Keys to Success" is not by Napolen Hill at all. It is a fairly short book by modern authors outlining the main principles of success found in Hill's other books, especially "Law of Success" and "Think and Grow Rich". Although renamed and reworded, the principles are the same as in Hill's original books and as such are sound, but "Keys to Success" reads like an abridged version of the aforementioned books and like all abridged books, it suffers from too much condensation and a lack of examples and elaborations. For those, who have read Hill's original books, it serves as a nice refresher but for those who haven't, it may remain too obscure.

Secondly, Hill's "Think and Grow Rich" from 1933 is actually a rewrite of sorts of his much larger "Law of Succcess" from 1928. Unfortunately it doesn't follow the same coherent structure as "Law of Success", introduces even more spiritual new age ideas than the former and his train of thought is all over the place. Although I have now read it a total of three times - once a bad translation more than 10 years ago and the second and third times just last month, one being a revised and updated 21st century edition and the other the original unmodified version - I still have a hard time understanding parts of it. As for the differences between the two versions, the revisions of the modern version consisted mainly of removing racial or sexist sounding language and adding modern commentary. I appreciated some of the modern commentary, since many of the people or concepts referred to in Hill's original version from 1933 are no longer familiar to the modern reader. However, I found that the direct tampering with the original text had altered some of the meaning and message of Hill's writing more than I could find justifiable. Overall though I found the added commentary more helpful than I found the tampering of the original text unjustified, so I give the modern version a slight recommendation over the original one.

Third comes Hill's "Law of Success", a monster of a book with a total of 1035 pages to it. The principles of success outlined by Hill are all sound and true and the work he seems to have done to amass these principles into one book seems to have been enormous. However, the book didn't really need to be 1035 pages long since much of the supporting framework built around the principles is of questionable value. Let me elaborate.

Although the book is filled to the brim with golden nuggets of wisdom, the constant barrage of Hill's personal pseudo-scientific ideas makes it a much harder read than it needs to be. This becomes especially evident in the very first chapter ("The Mastermind"), which by its very obscurity defends the whole book against the risk of being read by the more pragmatic and scientifically minded reader. Some of Hill's ideas and suggestions about what he calls "mind energy" and "mind chemistry" and his constant referring to telepathy and mind vibrations are in fact quite ridiculous. Having read the revised and updated 21st century version of this book, I wonder why none of that nonsense was removed. The multitudes of pseudo-scientific theories, most of which seem to have been conjured up in the mind of Hill himself, were highly speculative at the time of writing (in the 1920s) and are just plain silly today.

Interestingly enough, Hill claims that his only truly original contribution to all the laws and principles of success is the principle of that very same mastermind alliance, yet here is exactly where he steers off course the most. Although seemingly starting out as touting the positives of teamwork, Hill then goes downhill by attributing ethereal attributes to it and claiming things like vibrations of the mind moving through the ether from the thoughts of one person to another, telepathic abilities manifesting themselves in a collective mastermind of harmonious unity and similar nonsense.

It feels like Hill read a few sensationalist pseudo-scientific articles during his day and then, without even trying to confirm whether any of it was even remotely true, went on a tangent, extending and elaborating on these completely nonsensical theories and writing pages upon pages about them. Especially smitten is Hill with the ideas of "telepathy" and "ether" - he rolls them out every time he gets a chance and whenever he feels like it would give credibility to some of his other conjectures. In reality, "ether" was a speculative theory at the start of the 20th century about the nature of the universe and was considered to be the substance, through which all energy flowed (including radio waves and light). It was disproved and debunked fairly quickly, so the way Hill hangs on to it to "prove" the vailidity of many of his pseudo-scientific theories about how the mind works is highly regrettable.

In addition to a lot of quackery about ether and telepathy, we also find examples of the power of auto-suggestion to fend off pneumonia, cancer and even the bubonic plague. Knowing what we know about medicine and biology these days, some of the examples given are just plain silly - like the story of a woman, whose cancer tumour kept disappearing and reappearing depending on whether she was conscious or unconscious and thus whether she "believed" she had cancer or not. The principle of auto-suggestion is sound, but when such examples are used to seemingly illustrate its power, in really they only serve to undermine it.

Mixed with his pseudo-scientific ramblings is his ambivalent stance on religion. Although the editors of the revised edition keep commending him for never invoking any religion in his works, Hill's "infinite intelligence" as the creator of all the universe and an entity to pray to, the need to have "faith" and his constant professing of "christian values" is quite indistinguishable from referring to religion as I understand it. He even uses the creationist "blind watchmaker" argument in one of the chapters as proof, that the universe simply had to be created by intelligent design and a creator with a plan. On the other hand, he also invokes evolution and darwinism to back up some of his other theories. I don't really mind, whether the author is a religious creationist or a darwinist and atheist. What I do mind however, is when the author can't make up his mind and keeps switching sides whenever it suits his argument. Quoting both revivalist ministers and atheist humanists, I don't see this as being flexible and open-minded - I see this as the author being confused and not really knowing, what he himself really believes or thinks. It's a shame really, that so many of Hill's universally true principles of success, human psychology and self mastery are drowned out by tedious pseudo-scientific quasi-religious prose, which can make for a very frustrating read at times.

Additionally, instead of removing all that nonsense from the 21st century edition of the book, the editors have decided to dress it all up as magnificent foresight on Hill's part by claiming it to mean all kinds of other things instead of what Hill actually wrote. I remain thoroughly unconvinced though and so will any discerning reader.

Another puzzling aspect of the book is its constant redundancy. Some examples are not repeated just twice, but three, four or even five times in various chapters (sometimes almost word for word). I can understand, how redundancy can creep in, if you write a book over a number of years, however that same redundancy should get thrown out, if not during the editing stage, then in later editions by the very latest.

A matter of taste is the huge scattering of poems throughout the book. I am not a big fan of poetry myself, since my mind tends to wander the moment I stumble upon an artificially re-arranged word order (as so often happens in poetry to achieve a rhyme) and I don't think poems really address the modern reader like they might have a century ago, but I concede that this is a matter of opinion.

Even though I hardly touched upon the actual principles of success in this book, those are the ones that actually garner a four star rating from me. In spite of all the surrounding hogwash, the principles themselves are so true, that they outshine everything else. Without Hill's pseudo-scientific ramblings, this would in fact have been a five star book but since the golden nuggets of information are buried among too much "ether" and "mind vibrations", four stars is the best I can award this book or any its derivatives.