President's Spirituality
The president of Slovenia Janez Drnovšek published a book this Friday, Thoughts on Life and Awareness. Yesterday in a shopping mall I had the occasion to briefly list through the book. It's a book with not much contents, although it may seem otherwise. That's because it's printed on a thick paper (and a low-quality paper at that, like those daily newspapers), there's a thick margin on pages, and a big font with large letterspacing was used. I'm saying all that because it costs astounding 4990 SIT (20.79 EUR). For that money you get thoughts of 64 days, on average 2 pages a day. From my brief listing through the book I'd say that's about 10 sentences a day at most.As I mentioned, the president writes about his thoughts of the day. The focus is on life's philosophy and spirituality. A fews sentences I sampled were like rewritten rants to fit into the class of spirituality with a philosophical remark here and there. His recent discovery and fondness of buddhism is not something you can easilly miss here, either. Though some thoughts are a bit naive at times in this regard.
I should also mention that 100 SIT (less than half of Euro) out of every sold book is donated to some hospital for children, I forgot the exact name. That in itself could be considered a noble deed, but if you think about it it's only 2% of the price. Considering this it suddenly doesn't sound as noble anymore, more as an advertising for uneducated and gullible people, which this book seems to be targetting and of which there seems to be no shortage in sight in this country.
All in all I think the book has very good chances to be a hit and that the president has good chances to earn good money out of it. It is targetting the largest segment of the population, it is easy and short to read, the facts are mostly hard to check for the targetted population (meaning: who don't even know where a library is), there is no one story going through the whole book, deductions are easy to grasp even by an uneducated peasant, and the price is at the top of the range common folks are usually prepared to give out for a book of this (or any) sort and they are even encouraged to do so because then they could brag around how they helped a hospital for children, or shut your critique off because surely there couldn't be anything bad about it, because the sale is helping some hospital.
I think I'll donate 1000 SIT (like buying 10 copies, but still would get only a fifth of a copy for that) directly to this hospital just to cleanly cut off anyone throwing those sorts of remarks at me.
To me the president with this book seems like a freshman that hasn't even yet passed the first grade of buddhism, yet already wants to teach (preach to) everyone what is right and what is wrong. As a side point, I've heard he even wants to convince the Dalai Lama to become a vegetarian, because that's the purest form of being, or something.
A reviewer (Marcel Štefančič, jr) at the Mladina newspaper gave it 3 out of 5 points. Quoting some stuff out of the book, and with the remark at the end: "Thoughts on Life and Awareness are mixing facts and fiction -- like The Da Vinci Code. And like The Da Vinci Code they'll become the favourite book of those that don't read." Note that the reviewer probably had less than half a day to read the book and write the review. The book came out on Friday, the newspaper the next day, on Saturday. I tell you, with some effort you can read the entire book in less than two hours. To me it certainly isn't worth the price. But okay, I've read various works of Dalai Lama, Osho, Donald Neal Walsch, and others, so my expectations are probably quite high in this regard.
posted by AlesS @ 5/28/2006 04:05:00 PM
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