The Path

"The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything" is a deceptively titled book because it does not mention anything about the book's main subject: Classical Chinese Philosophy. Perhaps that is because people might not pick up the book if they truly knew its contents from the beginning. Based on a popular course at Harvard College, "The Path" make the bold claim that if you learn more about these thinkers, then it might just change your life. And honestly, I enjoyed learning more about this philosophical world and the book definitely whet my appetite to want to learn more. And I do feel that the book helped me understand some of my own biases and difficulties in my life. That being said, the problem of the book is that it tries to hard to be a mass-market self-help book. I wish it had been one and half times its length with more quotes and engagement with the thinkers and their ideas. Each chapter looks at a major thinker and one idea that can be applied to every-day life. While this is good to get people thinking, I do feel that something is lost in not explaining more details about the life of the thinker and their framework. I have the image in my mind of an editor forcing the authors to cut quotes and make it for "the public." Simply put, I felt like the book was far too simple and did not take seriously the intelligence of its audience to be able to tackle the texts themselves in addition to the analysis.