The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet

Yikes. I had hoped that Hoff would grow in the ten years after [b:Tao of Pooh 48757 The Tao Of Pooh (The Wisdom Of Pooh) Benjamin Hoff http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg 55188]. He did: he grew batshit.Hoff starts with a good-old-days rant about Man living in Harmony with Nature and Spirits and whatnot before a Great Separation which caused deserts to form and violence and Confucianism. Tin foil hat territory. I had to reread parts of it to see if he really meant all that... and as best I can tell, he does. Maybe in the second half of the book he goes ha-ha just kidding. I don't plan to find out.Piglet and his mafioso bodyguard wander through periodically. Then some ravings about news media and about the American educational system. I give up. I don't want my experience of Winnie-the-Pooh soiled by paranoid ramblings.

Nineties attitudes are alive and well and appropriating my childhood! I would not recommend this to anyone, for any reason. If you were looking for a quick, coherent guide into the tenets of Taoism, this ain't it. If you were looking for a pop psychology/self help type book cogently examining the philosophical or spiritual traits of dear Piglet, this ain't it. 
The author has opinions about everything that's wrong with society today, but they're presented as (uncited) facts and generalizations. If this was a choice to bulk up the book by matching Taoist thinking to all the ways it can fix what's wrong in the world, it's a clumsy effort. Likewise what is objectively an important environmental message gets buried under a lot of other tidbits and is left feeling out of place with the tone of the book. 
Considering the amount that other people are quoted, the author may have been better off producing a book of quotations. 
Don't get me started on the steaming pile that is the Eeyore Effect chapter. Definitely some toxic positivity added to the mix.
I could expound further on all the ways I found this book patronizing or offensive but I really don't want to spend any more time thinking about it.
 I'll have to track down some of the actual Winnie the Pooh books to give my brain a good rinse.

At the beginning of this book, the author mentions how he hadn't intended to write a sequel to his original “The Tao of Pooh,” but since that book had been such a Remarkable Success, he eventually just had to. After reading this book, it seems to me that it would have been better if he hadn't. Perhaps he was short of ideas, or hurting for money, or trying to recapture earlier success, but whatever the reason it seems he produced something that didn't really even captivate himself.

Honestly, it's been a while since I've read “The Tao of Pooh,” and it's possible there was just as much political posturing as is found in this book, but I don't recall it that way. My memory says “The Tao of Pooh” was a well constructed, reasonably presented book with a coherent message. My memory says “The Tao of Pooh” achieved its goal in illustrating Taoist principles using excerpts and examples from Pooh stories.

Unfortunately, “The Te of Piglet” doesn't live up to its pedigree. It's a disjointed diatribe hiding behind an alluring premise. There's quite a bit of railing against modern society and its evils, and quite a bit about how the Eeyores, Rabbits, and Owls of the world are causing so much disharmony and destruction. There's even a bit about how Piglet is a Very Small Animal with a Very Big Heart, which seemingly is the purpose of the book, but which gets bulldozed over by the author's pre-occupation with pushing his own political agenda. And I'm saying this as someone who generally agrees with the author's political agenda.

Ultimately, I didn't buy this book to get assaulted by politics, I read it to get a unique perspective on an Eastern philosophy that I admire. And that, sadly, seems to have only been the secondary or tertiary purpose of this book for the author.

If you liked “The Tao of Pooh,” do yourself a favor and don't pick this up. In some ways, I feel this book has ruined my perception of the earlier book, and of the author himself, which is a shame.