Summary Of Michael Puett And Christine Gross-Loh's The Path

Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh attempt to bring Confucius into 21st century American life in their book The Path. At first glance, the book seems to be about equally about discussing Confucius’ way of teaching in his heyday while also providing some ways that they may be applied in our daily modern lives. However, after reading it, the message I got from it was that Puett and Gross-Loh were simply trying to lift bits and pieces out of Confucianism and put them in a modern perspective without any contextualization. In The Path, the authors break one of the simple unwritten “rules” of philosophy: taking a particular kind of philosophy out of its original time period leads to confusion and misinterpretation. I’ll use this essay to speak
After all, that is exactly who the book is written for and targeted to. I went to Amazon.com and decided to look at the reviews for the book. One two-star-giving reviewer, Emre Sevinç, caught my eye. “Ronald Reagan as a Daoist leader?... I don't know if this is particularly about Harvard, or US style in general, but when a professor of Chinese philosophy waxes poetic about such a political figure without admitting what a superficial take this is, I can really feel the disturbance in The
Puett and Gross-Loh’s decision of attempting to add in aspects of high level philosophy and academia to what would otherwise be a self-help book was a mistake. I did a small amount of research on Christine Gross-Loh and found out that she is typically an author of parenting books. Inside this books, she usually has named the chapters a snappy name and come up with numerous small taglines that she intends to sum up her intentions in the passages. In an article in the Family section of the New York Times website, Gross-Loh includes lines that seem a little too much like “clickbait” for my liking. These include a “Stop looking For Your Passion” banner and a subtle “Be true to yourself? That’s not what Confucius would say…” As much as it seems that I’m castigating Gross-Loh, I feel that I’m following her more than I may be letting