You will instantly recognise that the book that Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World is talking about : Rhoda Byrnes pernicious little book The Secret.
One of the sad parts of that [people taking it seriously] is then they blame themselves when they fail to achieve all the money, the perfect relationships, the perfect health that was promised, because if they don't achieve it they are not trying hard enough, they are not focusing their thoughts well enough ... In this way of thinking, there is no such thing as economic conditions that are condemning many people to hard lives; there is no such thing as diseases that strike people independently of how nice their thoughts are; there is no room for earthquakes, tsunamis, oil spills, any kind of disaster, because anything that happens we really have brought on ourselves.
Kate Youde in The Independent quotes Ehrenreich (whose book, I must say, sounds like one I want to read!) talks about how Byrne's latest book, The Power, is predicted to be even more successful (if by "success" your are referring to numbers of copies and amount of money made), than The Secret :
... facts
19 million number of books sold worldwide
2 million copies of the DVD sold around the globe
32 number of languages the DVD is available in, including Turkish, Bulgarian and Icelandic
286,0000 number of fans on Facebook
1 where the book came on The New York Times bestseller list in March 2007. The film was also number one on Amazon.com's DVD chart in 2007We talked about this book some time back and readers of this blog couldn't come up with a single instance of Byrnes' hokum actually working, but there's little doubt that gullible readers in Malaysia will snap this up.
