DRMacIver's Notebook
Book Review “The Tao of Pooh and the Te of Piglet” by Benjamin Hoff
Book Review “The Tao of Pooh and the Te of Piglet” by Benjamin Hoff
The Tao of Pooh was mostly OK. I found it faintly annoying, but I can see how its advice would be useful to people.
The Te of Piglet can fuck right off. I’m not in any mood for your grumpy old man bullshit about Amazon Feminists who want to be men but insist on “nonsensical” gender-neutral language. I stopped reading at about that point and started skimming, but quickly decided that I wasn’t even interested in keeping skimming.
I was also fairly unimpressed by the number of objectively false things that the author believed, including that there were Taoists who lived to more than two hundred years and that the fact that we don’t believe the Taoist creation myths was the result of our reductive Western ways.
Anyway, this book is going in the firepit. It is not without its virtues, and if you find a solo copy of just the Tao of Pooh it might even be on balance worth reading, but I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone: Either the Te of Piglet will piss them off or worse it won’t piss them off and they might take it seriously.