Spinning Straw Into Gold: Straight Talk for Troubled Times
Over the decades, Morris Berman has provided readers with compelling books whose topics range from spiritual awareness to probing analysis of America’s decline. In “Spinning Straw Into Gold*”* he explores his own life trajectory as he stepped away from society’s traditional demands andmeasures of meaning, and found what was truly meaningful instead. The result is a powerful, timely, and mind-opening challenge for all of us to do the same.–Nomi Prins, author of “It Takes a Pillage*”, “*Black Tuesday*,*” and other works.For years Morris Berman has been describing the downfall of America, an argument that shocked many by its apparent pessimism. But a sensitive reader will have discerned a very positive message at the bottom of his recent trilogy on the American decline: that we are the last survivors of a failed empire, and will witness the emergence of a better, more balanced relation to the world from the ruins of its destructive manias and obsessions. Berman writes in the tradition of Paul Goodman’s “*Growing Up Absurd*,” Erich Fromm’s “Escape from Freedom*,*” and the mother lode of all such individual wisdom in America, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” This is not your typical self-help manual, but a clear-headed, translucently reasoned account of how one individual broke free from a dysfunctional culture and now gives us a way to accomplish the same liberation for ourselves.–Paul Christensen, author of “The Human Condition” and “Strangers in Paradise