APOTHEOSIS NOW by Yanhao Huang is another in a long line of books that attempt the seemingly impossible: telling people how to be happy. Huang starts by distinguishing material success–money, job, status–from happiness, pointing out that, though some people appear to have both, the two are actually at odds. “We believe,” he writes, “that only from our constant dissatisfaction with life will we have the necessary drive to endure the hardships that will eventually lead us to success.” Suffering leads us to ponder life’s mysteries, such as, What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of existence? Who am I? How do I get what I want? Is there a God? What is the truth? Huang’s purpose is not to spoon feed his readers these answers. Rather, he aims to “break the existing belief system you have built to unveil a much greater intelligence that’s already within you.”

Sounds good. Self-help books always have grandiose raisons d’être. Where they falter, typically, is in explaining how to accomplish such lofty goals. How, for example, can one find this intelligence? How can it be cultivated? Where can it be deployed? Huang spends the rest of the book trying to explain, but his thoughts are vague, meandering. So he does what most writers do when the rubber doesn’t meet the road but floats off into the ether: he writes down a lot of quotes. Lao Tzu, Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, the Bhagavad Gita–you get the picture. His book has no discernible thesis, no easy-to-understand framework, and few illustrations. There isn’t even an introduction! The writing is generally error-free, though there are infelicitous passages such as, “We are not caricatures; our beliefs, capabilities, and personalities can change at random without good explainable reason. This is why we have so much problems in our relationships.”

Yanhao Huang’s APOTHEOSIS NOW is yet another self-help book whose ideas are hard to discern amid opaque, unfocused writing.

~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader