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Revision as of 11:50, 13 March 2012
, 11:50, 13 March 2012no edit summary
Karen French is a joint graduate of mathematics and marketing. The relevance of the first area of study is very clear in the ''The Hidden Geometry of Life'', but the second one also has an influence: the book actually looks like a PR or a marketing textbook, with numerous quotes, boxes, case studies and similar. On second thoughts, marketing books share these traits with self-help books, both traditional and new-age ones, so maybe this is more of the author's inspiration, but I don't think it enhances French's work. The layout is very busy, with many coloured boxes in addition to hundreds of photos and drawings, and the number of quotations is simply overwhelming. ''The Hidden Geometry of Life'' doesn't really encourage linear, focused reading which I think is a failing in a book with such a spiritual aim. Although ''The Hidden Geometry of Life'' is a very attractive book to look at, it contains an immense selection of images: probably too many images in fact. Fewer, but better selected and larger would make the result a little less chaotic.
The text itself is hard to read, rather convoluted and peppered with special Nouns that clearly deserve a Capital Letter. This convention is explained and justified in the preface but I still found it annoying and immensely distracting. As a lot of mystical, and particularly New-Age-mystical products, quite a bit of the text is rather obscure and one might suspect, rather nonsensical. French doesn't reach the abysmally crude depths that books of the kind of [[The Secretby Rhonda Byrne]] descend to, and a lot of what she says makes – in principle, at least – sense. But there are still numerous unwarranted conjectures and leaps of reasoning and plenty to entertain those that delight in the absurd: ''in the multi-planed Universe the blueprint for the whole remains evident in every part, even without your own body.''. Scientific theories are used a little bit like ornamental flourishes, and just like the too-many pictures, there are also too-many theories and concepts presented.
Unlike many New-Age books that will only appeal to the devotees, ''The Hidden Geometry of Life'' has some attraction for anybody interested in playing with the ideas. You can dip into it, read a quotation from Plato, Lao Tzu or Goethe, read about symbolic meanings of a particular shape or form in various cultures, examine the extraordinary selection of images and let your mind wander – and wonder. Or you can get infuriated by the typically New-Ageish misuse and abuse of concepts of modern physics and cosmology. Some readers might even follow the whole sequence of ideas that culminates in the aforementioned ''Gateway to Becoming'' all the way to the spiritual illumination it seems to signify.
