Turtles All the Way Down - Judith DeLozier and John Grinder

Paperback - 424 pages

2.5/5

I will say right now that I have trained with John Grinder and by my reckoning he was absolutely awesome. So I bought this book to learn more about his 'New Code NLP' and...

This book could have been great - it is chock full of useful ideas and new distinctions, but so utterly lacks structure and navigability and is so badly 'written' that for me it becomes almost useless. Here's why: With so much information, it is impossible to take it in with one pass. So a reader like me might like to revisit certain parts for a review. But there is no functional contents page and no index whatsoever.

To give you an idea, the contents page reads thus:

ix - A Beginning
xi - Preface
3 - Day One
94 - Day Two
180 - Day Three
255 - Day Four
388 - Day Five
385 - Afterword
387 - Footnotes
391 - Bibliography

Now, there was a lot that was good in this book - but I can't find it now! I could re-read the whole book, but that would be too painful because (stylistically speaking) it is dreadfully written (though I have read reviews that disagree). It is a transcript of a five-day seminar which seems not to have been edited for superfluity, making it (for me) a very hard read.

All of this is a great shame because there is a lot of valuable information contained inside. If this book where re-edited (or even edited) into a tighter package, with a functional contents and index included, it would be an absolute classic. But it has not.

Though I must add, I absolutely loved the story about William James recounted in A Beginning. I laughed out loud.