Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Let me begin by saying that I am a college professor of comparative religions and an ordained minister in a progressive branch of Christianity. I am an admirer of Huxley's presentation of the perennial philosophy, Huston Smith's appreciation of the world's major faith traditions, and Joseph Campbell's conviction concerning the power of myth. I am a mystic by inclination. In other words, I am predisposed to take religion and spirituality seriously. It may come as some surprise, then, that I found Morgan's book nothing short of detestable. I forced myself to finish the wretched thing because I promised a former student who greatly admired it that I would. The first and least of the book's problems is its utterly artless and amateurish style. To call Morgan's prose sophomoric would be to praise it far too highly. One would expect a best-selling author (or her editors) to know the difference between "farther" and "further," "lay" and "lie," "like" and "as," "racial" and "racist," and "mound" and "monolith," to cite but a few glaring examples. An acquaintance who has seen the self-published original says that it was rife with misspellings and grammatical errors as well, making the flawed edition that I read a vast improvement. Mercy. How, I wondered, could a well-educated person write such graceless prose? Eventually I answered my own question. (See below.) The second issue -- whether this is pure fiction, partial fiction, or a factual account -- has been well argued by others. The author apparently claimed from the start, in every possible public medium, that it was based on her real experiences, then hedged, then recanted, then hedged again. Even the aboriginal man named Burnum Burnum, who at first endorsed the book, later expressed his regret for having done so and severed all ties with Morgan. (It turns out that he was an urbanized man who knew little or nothing of the Outback anyway.) After reading the book, I simply cannot imagine how anyone could have even entertained the possibility that it was depicting real people and events. The whole story is utterly preposterous from the beginning. The author (or her alter-ego) is kidnapped, thinking that she is being shuttled to a ceremony to receive an award that no one has ever promised her. During a harrowing four-hour Jeep-journey into the wilderness of a foreign land at the hands of an incommunicative male stranger, she shows no real fear and raises not a word of protest, much less look for a chance of escape. Any normal (or real) person would have been scared witless and thought of survival and self-preservation. Then her clothes, her documents, and her cherished valuables are taken and thrown into a fire, and her reaction amounts to an "Oh, well." On top of it all, the characters in the tribe are so two-dimensional and stereotypical (and Native American!) as to appear completely, albeit ineptly, contrived. Fact or fiction, a story must be plausible; and this one, from the get-go, is not. A third issue annoyed me from the start. Morgan presents herself, vaguely, as a physician and health-care professional, which sets up a nice contrast with the medicinal folkways of her tribal captor-hosts and, of course, adds an air of scientific credibility to the entire account. She further (as opposed to "farther") presents herself as a person in demand for her medical expertise, one who has "lectured in Denmark, Brazil, Europe, and Sri Lanka" (p. 106), apparently oblivious to the fact that Denmark is in Europe. Late in the book, however, she alludes to "the American six-year healing arts programs to become an M.D., D.C., or D.O." (p. 168) I have never known either an M.D. or a D.O. who would sandwich a chiropractic degree between two real medical degrees like that, much less equate their many years of post-baccalaureate study with the high school-plus-two that is the minimum requirement for chiropractors. That led me to suspect what I later confirmed: Morgan is a retired chiropractor! (I dedicate that exclamation point to her. She appears to love them.) The fact that she cloaks that fact under the broad term "physician" and pretends to have real medical expertise of a scientific, clinical kind is disingenuous at best. Also of interest is the fact that Morgan apparently resides, not in Kansas City, Missouri, but in nearby Lee's Summit. Now that "just happens to be" the world headquarters for the original and still main branch of Unity. Not coincidentally, I suspect, most of the central teachings that Morgan ascribes to her alleged aboriginal tribe -- such as "Divine Oneness," "universal abundance," "Jesus as eldest brother," reality is perception, and death as a transition to one's "highest good" -- are barely veiled references to pivotal Unity principles (which, by the way, I happen to find meaningful). As if it were not obvious by now, Morgan's most serious problem is her credibility. That has been so thoroughly undermined by real Aboriginal groups, scholars, and no less than the Washington Post that no thoughful, informed person could possibly believe her account to be factual, her to be truthful, or her "Real People" to be anything but figments of her imagination. The fact that she has nevertheless drawn such a wide and enthusiastic audience (and made millions of dollars in royalities, speaker's fees, tapes, etc.) attests that she had the kernel of a compelling idea. Too bad that she didn't see fit to couch her spiritual truth -- as indigenous and other religious peoples everywhere always have -- in myth or parable, which is to say, the vessel of honest fiction. As it stands, what might have been a useful testimonial to Oneness is tarnished beyond redemption by an author's severe and cynical lack of personal integrity. If she had a treasure to give us, she delivered it in a very earthen, but terribly leaky, vessel.