Paradoxical Commandments: Finding Personal Meaning in a Crazy World (Hardcover)

by Spencer Johnson (Foreword), Kent M. Keith (Author)

Review
'[The Paradoxical Commandments] is simple, eloquent and profound. It will touch you in surprising ways. Most important, it will help you to live a life that is rich in personal meaning.' - Spencer Johnson, M.D., author of Who Moved My Cheese? 'The Paradoxical Commandments' are a set of common sense ideas on how to be successful through service to others. Their author, Kent Keith, has tested them and proven that they do work. They are as clear a guide as I've seen on how to be a good person by doing the right thing.' - Wally Amos, author of The Power In You

Kent M Keith first wrote his Paradoxical Commandments for student activists while at Harvard in the 1960s. Published in a modest handbook format, the Commandments did not go away. Though Keith himself had moved on, he was constantly coming across them, sometimes published anonymously, sometimes in the form of a poem and finally in a book about Mother Theresa, who apparently kept them on the wall of one of her children's homes. The growing interest in his Commandments has led to Keith publishing them again in a more professional format, with each Commandment expanded, explained and illustrated with anecdotes from Keith's own life and from history. The Paradoxical Commandments are far from platitudinous; they certainly do not offer the reader an easy way through life. For example, 'Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway' is illustrated by a somewhat chilling incident in which Keith, as a teenager, was dismissed on the spot and run out of town for preaching honesty to a group of students. The Commandments are unrelenting and include such advice as 'What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway' and 'People favour underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.' It is the virtue of Keith's commentary that he does not make them easy but shows how they can be possible. The '60s are often credited with giving birth to New Age philosophies and it is easy to see this book taking its place amongst the self-help and self-awareness volumes that New Age thinking has inspired. However, it must not be forgotten that the '60s were also a time of protest and willingness to sacrifice for social justice. From that time, the Paradoxical Commandments come to the self-interested 21st century as a non-religious morality based on doing what is right, not what is easy. (Kirkus UK) 

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