Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The book condition was perfect and arrived very quickly, so no complaints there. I will even give points for the book binding and the paper used. As for the content, however, this book is awful. If you want a spiritual journey with depth read Siddhartha, or the Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter, or a host of stories from Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. If you want Dr. Wayne Dyer's platitudes wrapped in the most overt metaphors and cliches humanly possible: buy this book. The premise of the book can be summed up in one quote:"[W]hen you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." Other ways you might sum this book up are: "Be all you can be." "Just do it." "What the mind [or heart] can conceive, it [will] achieve." "Live in the moment." "The answer lies within." One of the most climactic moments in the story is where Santiago--who has been learning to convene with "The Soul of the World"--stands on top of a dune and becomes one with the wind. The problem is, that even as a work of fiction and not an *actual* self-help book, the story comes across as shallow and so overtly New Age that it borders on the ridiculous. Coelho (mis)appropriates religious texts at his leisure and binds them to his thesis that the "Language of the World" is that all things are one. Moreover, magic and the supernatural as elements of good fiction are one thing (e.g. anything by Toni Morrison or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's, One Hundred Years of Solitude) and The Alchemist incorporates those certainly but what the book lacks is subtlety. Coehlo's problem (cliches and platitudes aside) is assuming a remarkable lack of intelligence on behalf of his reader. All the metaphors are laid out and every lesson is the same: follow your dreams, er, I mean your "Personal Legend." Even the capitalization is ridiculous and gives a faux sense of importance to ideas that are so vapid they would be funny if Coehlo did not peddle them as legitimate. I cannot stress enough how terrible this book is. From preposterous romantic drivel to all the babbling about listening to one's heart, you'd be just as well off watching day time pop-psychologists. The problem with platitudes and cliches is that in times of actual distress, suffering, pain, anxiety, worry, doubt, loss, etc., they are shown for what they are: nothing. And in a way this book is dangerous because it risks convincing us that nothing should stand in the way of what we want and that our only guide is our sense and the ability to "read the omens" (whatever that may mean). This risks making others pawns in our game of self-defined self-fulfillment and does nothing for those who have desperate, pressing needs, and who cannot be succored by some half-baked consolation that "the universe" is conspiring for them.