Amazon Refuses to Post Review of “Ego Is The Enemy”

Amazon Refuses to Post Review of “Ego Is The Enemy”

Apparently Amazon wants to protect some of its  best selling authors, and refused to print this review, so here it is to warn the rest of you:

IT TAKES CHUTZPAH TO WRITE EGO IS THE ENEMY (by Ryan Holiday)

 

This book is so incredibly poorly written and supercilious that I scarcely know where to begin. It’s like it was written to support a TEDx talk. And how much ego does it require for an author to explain that ego is our enemy? Holiday attempts to explain this away in the introduction, and fails. He comes across as bombastic and pretentious in what I’d call a “booklet.” The work is 200 pages on 5X7 stock, with a LOT of white space. Chapters are all about six pages, leading me to believe he simply created a template for the content and filled it—unsuccessfully.

 

Worse, he distorts history. All of his examples are ancient—Eisenhower, Genghis Khan, Howard Hughes, ad infinitum. (Another annoying habit he has is that he sprinkles Latin phrases all over which he then interprets, as if the reader won’t understand them unless the teacher explains. How’s that for ego? Why use them if they have to be interpreted?) He cites General George McClellan of the Union forces as “perhaps the worst of all Union generals” (McDowell, Hooker, Burnside, and others had far worse records) yet McClellan WON the battle of Antietam which enabled Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation! In another passage he tells us that Alexander the Great (one of his favorite bad examples of ego) was “probably killed by dissenting soldiers.” Yet every scholarly study I’ve seen supports disease—typhoid or malaria—as the probable cause.

 

This is the way he simply bends facts to fit his dubious points. The book has no index. You can’t tell (or read, or find) when and who he introduces in what context, and it has ZERO SOURCES. He uses scores of stories with no indication that they’re real or where he got them, as if he were talking to Jackie Robinson himself. He conveniently uses General George Marshall as an example of small ego and success during WW II, but readily ignores his counterpart, Admiral Ernest King, Chief of Naval Operations, who had a huge, irascible ego according to every biography, yet is credited with winning the war in the Pacific. This is the kind of non-academic, dubious “research” that went into this book. Holiday is entitled to his own opinions and guesses, but not to his own history and facts. And the books is chock full of those kind of embarrassments.

 

Then there are the totally jarring, unnecessary obscenities, the “f-bomb,” and “asshole” and assorted street talk, in the same paragraphs as Greek philosophers, as if to say, “See, I’m really cool and one of the guys.” I get the impression he’d have a baseball cap on backwards as he wrote this.

 

I also get the impression that Holiday surrounded himself with philosophy, history, and biographical books and cherry-picked (or had someone else cherry -pick) quotes that supported his points, no matter what the surrounding context. It would be like my finding a quote by Peter Drucker that included “Ridiculous,” then writing about strategy and stating, “As Drucker said about it, ‘Ridiculous’!” (He actually explains who Peter Drucker and Genghis Khan were, but drops in people like Flannery O’Connor without any introduction at all (American writer born in 1925).

 

The entire book simply keeps repeating itself that “ego is bad, lack of ego is good.” He stomps all over John DeLorean, but won’t mention Elon Musk. In fact, all of his examples are so old that you begin to choke on the dust. He actually maintains that Steve Jobs’s ego changed after he returned to Apple, which is counter to everything I’ve read in the press and in Isaacson’s brilliant biography of him.

 

This book was written to make money, in my view, not to inform or help others improve. It’s a one-trick pony without any substantiating evidence or sources for the author’s simplistic notions of ego. He has the usual accumulation of testimonials over several pages at the outset, as if to try to prove that somehow what follows is respectable intellect. I wonder how many of those people read the book?

I wonder, also, why Amazon is so appalled at a reader’s reaction? You have to wonder what other censorship takes place.

© Alan Weiss 2016