BAD Books
Karen Kingston
Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui
The Puritan obsession with cleanliness married to pop psychology to explain how we run our lives and exhibit emotions through our clutter — how it keeps us chained to the past and fosters disharmony — which links with our sense of identity, status, security, and territoriality.
Not a shred of scientific evidence to back it up, and the author actually owes her theories to Calvinist theology.
Except for what she says about enemas. There she’s on her own.
Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui
You know you are off to a rocky start when Denise Linn — sort of the Richard Simmons of fengshui — is tapped to write the foreword.
Definitely would appeal to people who can’t get out of her own way and think a sickly soup of pop psychology, sympathetic magic, cargo cult and commodity fetishism can supplant the services of a good therapist.
She likes to think she’s part of the healing profession, but she’s really just practicing medicine without a license. Morris Berman calls people like this “wounded healers” and warns that they are dangerous.
Karen Rauch Carter
Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life
Commodity fetishism and cargo cult plastered over New Age excrementizing.
Carter somehow confuses classical, Newtonian physics with the Black Sect Buddhist religion.
Carter claims that “proper feng shui is purposefully arranging the stuff around you to gain positive results.” This is how Rohan Candappa in Wrong Shui — a personal favorite — could say that fengshui consists of “basically moving stuff around.”
If this Newtonian wishful thinking worked, someone would have capitalized on it much sooner and fine-tuned it (get rid of the clutter in the Skills and Knowledge corner — which is the same place in your house as it is in mine — you’ll get whatever it is you want).
In other words, if life was this easy, people everywhere would have been doing this sort of thing for centuries. However, they haven’t been, which makes you wonder about the accuracy of this book. How did this easy fix escape humanity’s notice? Could a better arrangement in a Relationship Corner in the Twin Towers have prevented their collapse on September 11, 2001? Did Bill Gates move something purple into his Prosperity area to maneuver Microsoft into a monopoly? Is the Helpful Friends area of Darfur creating gang-rape, terror, and genocide?
Are we really so stupid to believe such blatant hogwash? To parody one of Carter’s disgusting little sayings, I offer the following:
If you don’t control your credulity, it controls you.
Jami Lin
Contemporary Earth Design
Self-published and edited with a chainsaw to make woo appear consistent with more measured approaches. Overblown hype about the book claims it was written by “40 of the world’s top fengshui masters.”
If only.
Feng Shui Anthology
Another chimera. Apparently there were concerns that the public was bright enough to notice the differences between woo fengshui and traditional.
Only thing worth buying this for — and buy it used, so the author receives no royalties — is for Ho Lynn’s acknowledgment that Lin Yun invents his fengshui.
Lin is most notable for her admission that she invents a lot of what she tells the public. That explains her Blender School of Feng Shui.
Daniel David Kennedy
Feng Shui for Dummies
The guy responsible for the idea of magnetic stoves is back, this time with his own book. People have written to tell me that it’s genuinely awful. I’d say the title speaks volumes about the content. Do yourself a favor—be an idiot (and buy “Idiot’s Guide to Feng Shui”) not a dummy. Unless you honestly believe that drivel about magnetic stoves!
Now that Kennedy has studied with Joseph Yu, perhaps he’s reconsidered the stove idea.
David Twicken
Flying Star Feng Shui Made Easy
Twicken at one time studied with Larry Sang. Perhaps the book contains his notes from one of those courses. In my version it was apparent the book was self-published (an e-publisher “vanity house”) due to a problem with quality.
People I know have found calculation errors in this book. Unless you can do the math yourself (in which case why would you buy it?), tread carefully.
Nancilee Wydra
Feng Shui Book of Cures, Look Before You Love
And anything else she has on the market.
Wydra’s books are noted for their lack of research and emphasis on woo, but Look Before You Love is especially remarkable for the quality of its mistakes.
Entertain her ideas at your own risk.
Lillian Too
Easy to Use Feng Shui, 168 Ways to Success, Essential Feng Shui, Little Book of Feng Shui
Glossy, stock-photo "masterpieces" by the Rupert Murdoch of fengshui. Great for the coffee table, not so great for do-it-yourself. People have found calculation errors in her books, so read with a healthy dose of skepticism.
The New I Ching
I don’t need to say anything — read this review and draw your own conclusions about the rest of Too’s work.
Susan Levitt and Seann Xenja
Taoist Feng Shui
Vomitus. Worthless because it tries to explain Taoism through the pseudo-Buddhist perspective of the church of Lin Yun.
Because the book has no foundation in authentic Taoism it cannot explain the relation of Taoism to fengshui. (A companion volume, Taoist Astrology, includes Xenja providing a “two thumbs up” review — not exactly "fair and balanced" reviewing.)
The alleged “authentic Chinese traditions” these people promote are fake. Chinese did not use Old Irish names for the phases of the moon!
Learn about authentic Taoism from authentic experts. Learn about the DNA results on the Tarim mummies that link them to Iran and Margush (Oxus culture)/Afanasievo/Yamnaya, not Ireland or Scotland. Then try to read the book without laughing aloud.
Nancy Santo Pietro
Feng Shui: Harmony by Design, Feng Shui for Health
With a foreword by Lin Yun.
The woman is a master of woo. Before a consultation, SantoPietro requires nine red envelopes, with at least one dollar bill in each one. She uses these to capture the "aura" of people who live in a house!
God help her if the house is vacant. She would have to pinch a dollar from the realtor.
SantoPietro also throws "blessed red rice" against houses to deflect the "bad energy" from passing traffic. (Rice blessed by whom and how?)
Wouldn’t it be nice for a change if woo could do something truly useful—like deflect particulate matter that causes severe asthma attacks in children living near busy roadways.
Dr. Ong Hean-Tatt
Amazing Scientific Basis of Feng Shu
I have succumbed to other books by Dr. Ong because I find them deliciously weird and occasionally fruitful. However, this one is more Bob Frissell than anything.
And the "science" is really, really, REALLY awful!
Buy the book for a science-savvy friend as a joke. However, be warned that the recipient may beat you with it.
Ralph and Lahni DeAmicis
Feng Shui and the Tango, Power Feng Shui, Feng Shui American Style
The DeAmicis get my vote for most outrageous cranks. They couldn’t get a book deal like other McFengshui poseurs so they started their own publishing company, Cuore Libre. The Mom-and-Pop thing shows in the writing, editing, and production (all bad). Ralph does the artwork, along with his many other occupations.
Most troubling is the undercurrent of racism in their writing that should unsettle anyone — but their clientele seem blind to the racism and inaccuracies.
Those whose fifteen minutes in the McFengshui fame corner have passed…
Terah Kathryn Collins
Home Design with Feng Shui A to Z, Western Feng Shui
More McFengshui. The first book is organized alphabetically — just in case her readers need to practice their ABCs. (Considering how dumb her books are, it is entirely possible.) The second reads almost like a parody of the typical New Age self-help book.
Except that it isn’t one.
Mai’a Martin
Feng Shui for the Southern Hemisphere
Mai’a (all three versions of her) has left the fengshui business. She seems to have sold to some earnest-looking ladies, who don’t have a clue their concepts were debunked a long time ago.
R.D. Chin
Feng Shui Revealed
More McFengshui, this time with architect credentials. Unfortunately the author knows McBagua. He has absorbed many of the illusions people have about Frank Lloyd Wright (including many the man spun for himself).
Frank Lloyd Wright was most emphatically NOT a "fengshui natural." That shows a lack of education in real fengshui or Frank Lloyd Wright.
If you believe this idea, have you walked through structures built by Frank Lloyd Wright? People forget about Wright’s love of low ceilings (Wright once ordered his son-in-law William Wesley Peters to sit down because his height was ruining the scale.). He disliked kitchens and bathrooms. (Perhaps, as one wag noted, the waterfall at Fallingwater was supposed to be the toilet.) People don’t realize how much you bump and bruise yourself in one of his homes.
There are other reasons to bemoan any connection with fengshui. This is not a man who understood wu wei.
[Wright’s buildings] are cool to look at, and Wright was truly a genius, but he was a genius entirely on his own terms. Wright didn’t design for you — you had to become a convert to Wright, and that included putting up with all his quirks, including the one that seemed to place the need for a durable structure much further down the list of priorities than it probably should have been. That is, Wright really didn’t care quite so much if things leaked or broke, as long as the overall composition was uncompromised. He was a high-maintenance little dude, and his buildings can be equally high-maintenance.
The need for sustainability, building to suit the site, durability, and other considerations we assume are part of fengshui were not as important to Wright.
Frank Lloyd Wright saw the need for exurbs and suburban sprawl. He thought we would all be suburban-farmers and ride helicopters to work, but that was only one of several of his controversial ideas.
Many experts have connected the dots from Wright (who believed cities were good for “banking and prostitution, and little else”) to Abraham Levitt’s Levittowns. Suburbia is the Wright life (only he wanted more acreage). It is what many pundits deplore as the leading cause of isolation, discontent, and fat people.
Although Wright disdained the Levitt houses as trash, Levitt was fond of pointing out that he had been able to produce the low-cost houses that Wright had only theorized.
— suburbia historian Barbara Kelly
Wright’s idea was to improve Nature, rather like Dr Eldon Tyrrell talking about his creations in Blade Runner: “More human than human.”
And by the way, Wright thought most of us were dull, tasteless, and stupid.
[Wright] loved the idea of the people so long as the people were loving him. But the fact that … what the people really wanted was a little brick Georgian house or a little Cape Cod cottage or something drove him crazy. He hated it. And so then, of course, he turned against them and talked about how they were the mobocracy and this was this, you know, this tyranny of terrible taste and so forth. He couldn’t accept the idea that middle-brow taste was what it was and that he was really beyond that and that his own work appealed to much more sophisticated people.
—Paul Goldberger, architecture critic
Robin Lennon
Home Design from the Inside Out: Feng Shui, Color Therapy, and Self-Awareness
Lennon advertises herself as a fengshui expert, but admits that she says she can do it without any formal training "because fengshui is so hot." Then she explains that the rules of fengshui "don’t work" for her.
Nice doublespeak.
She’ll ask clients such bizarre things as "What is the color of your soul?" (Go Dada: answer "umi.")
Of course Lennon is obsessed with clutter. She’s explicit about removing everything in hallways — including something as useful as coathooks.
Your mother would not ask you such bizarre questions and she would give you better advice. Save the money on the book and call your mother instead.
T. Raphael Simons
Feng Shui Step By Step
During the fad, the money being made off Feng Shui books was astronomical — every publishing house had to have its version. This latest in the line of “Feng Shui for Gullible Americans” series is a case in point.
There are some quirks: Simons uses Western astrology in his fengshui readings, but writes the predictions in Chinese.
WTF?!
Angie Ma Wong
Feng Shui Do’s and Taboos
She went to school, so why is this so bad? And that includes her "fengshui decoder" thing. Unintentionally funny.
Elizabeth Miles
The Feng Shui Cookbook
Paint your kitchen white, "the color of purity and cleanliness." This is Western culture’s concept of color. In Asia, white is the color of death. Now you have an idea how clueless the author is about feng shui.
Angel Thompson
Feng Shui
A classic in New Age doublespeak. One sentence says fengshui is "practical," and the example that follows is pure woo.
No wonder Thompson had to have a real feng shui practitioner come and sort out the mess she made of her house.
Kirsten Lagatree
Feng Shui: Arranging Your Home To Change Your Life
More of the same McFengshui cargo cult and commodity fetishism with different pictures and layout.
Isn’t anyone going to stand up and ask how it is that suddenly we can merely paint our walls and move the couch to the other side of the room to transform our lives? Why does it work now when this sort of thing has never worked for people before?
Sarah Rossbach
Feng Shui the Art of Placement
The seminal work that launched a religion and the most famous fengshui sound bite. Well written but dubious information.
Interior Design with Feng Shui
The book that launched the New Age obsession with interior design. To her credit, Rossbach introduces the theories as the product of Lin Yun’s fertile mind. The introduction explains the ideas in the book as “embellishments” and reworkings of classical Chinese science and philosophy.
And once that disclaimer was out of the way, they set to work remaking the Chinese world for people who had little contact with anything Chinese beyond take-out food.
William Spear
Feng Shui Made Easy
The Granddaddy of McFengshui! This book took BTB ideas one step further in the New Age mythos — all the way to Arterio-Socratic. Spear vaguely acknowledges his literary debt to Lin Yun by confirming “explorations of Tibetan Buddhism revealed to me more about the origin of fengshui.” (p. 6)
Dennis Fairchild
Healing Homes
McFengshui with lots of cute pictures. Total mind-candy.
Richard Webster
101 Feng Shui Tips for the Home
More New Age bovine byproduct in a traditional, quick and easy "dumb American" format.
Feng Shui for Love and Romance
Written with the truly desperate woman in mind — because self-respecting men wouldn’t stoop to this kind of idiocy to get a woman. Wishful thinking is so much cheaper than getting off your ass and taking charge of your life.
If you want good advice, read Sidney Biddle Barrows’ book, which has nothing to do with fantasy (or fengshui) and everything to do with finding someone.
Ernest J. Eitel
Feng-Shui
Full of Victorian racism that compounds his errors regarding Chinese science and culture. He claims feng shui had its beginnings in ancestor worship, which is incorrect. So are many of his other pronouncements. Unfortunately, his errors have crept into other people’s books — mostly the McFengshui crowd, because this is an easy read.
Read DeGroot if you must have the Victorian missionary’s snooty opinion of Chinese culture. His information in general is more accurate.
"The Tempest" and the Crackpot
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
—Bertrand Russell
The idea of order for premodern Europeans had a certain mathematical neatness that would have been appreciated by premodern Chinese. But medieval Europeans were obsessed by a fear of chaos, a terrifying cosmic anarchy best explained humorously by Bill Murray in Ghostbusters II as
Human sacrifices! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!
Premodern Europeans wanted an orderly universe based on Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being. At the top was God, and moving downward from the pinnacle you’d find the angels, the monarch, great nobles, lesser nobles, and the rest of us (and we were about 96 percent of the population).
The sovereign once ruled over the land because he was "the master of time" (the calendar), but over time and with cultural reinterpretation, sovereignty distorted into rulership based on one’s pedigree or genetics (after gens — breeding — which brought us gentry and gentleman).
The logical extension of the Great Chain produced Louis XIV and Charles I. (It also heavily contributed to antisemitism, but that is another story.) What was once considered ruling "by the grace of God" or "mandate of heaven" degenerated into the divine right of kings.
A place for us
In the ancient sense (which evaporated in America only with the coming of the first world war) place also signified a particular piece of land and a sense of politics. Status in society was linked to land-owning, and one’s responsibilities were tied to the land. One knew one’s place (people still said this about black people until the 1970s). A woman’s place was in the home (people still said this about women in the 1970s).
In Europe until the Enlightenment (and, in some places, until the present day), marginalized social groups such as Roma, Jews, and females, were not allowed to own land, and thus prevented from sharing the communal sense of place.
Perhaps the property laws explained why some Victorian men argued at length about whether women were actually human.
Chain of fools
You can find the brave new version of these ancient ideas in Nancilee Wydra’s books and Feng Shui Institute of America (Winchester, Ohio) and Feng Shui Institute International (Marco Island, Florida). Her Pyramid School is merely Aristotle’s "great chain of being" updated to New Age.
The marketing for FSIA says it addresses
…Western beliefs and values. The “pyramid” philosophical approach synthesizes wisdom and knowledge from all of the schools of feng shui while filtering out cultural and geographical proclivities.
“Cultural and geographical proclivities”? Pyramid School marketing makes traditional ecological knowledge (in this case it’s feng shui) sound like a perversion. Savor the irony: Western beliefs and values are a “cultural and geographical” proclivity.
What FSIA teaches and Wydra espouses bears no resemblance to authentic feng shui — on purpose. Wydra formed Pyramid School “to offer an option for those who wanted to incorporate their own beliefs and values into feng shui approaches.” FSIA claims to have borrowed “wisdom and knowledge from all of the schools of feng shui” — but it only uses ideas from Lin Yun. (A teacher who has studied “Black Hat, Nine Star Ki and Modern feng shui” would not know authentic feng shui if it came up and slapped him.)
Pyramid School sees feng shui as a form of strip-mining. Wydra defines feng shui as
the vehicle that can help you … harness the physical surroundings for personal advantage.
That’s just a New Age-y way to express greed. That’s why it works so well with the law of attraction.
Do they have a feng shui solution for climate change? Don’t hold your breath.
FSIA sells confidence tricks such as subjective validation and cold reading as feng shui classes. For a class called “Conducting and Writing a Powerful Feng Shui Consultation,” you learn “listening actively for key words” and “read[ing] body language.” Students are taught these techniques “to help … determine the true issues that confront the client.”
Along with being the hallmarks of grifters and scam artists, in the US this is tantamount to practicing medicine (psychology or psychiatry) without a license. It leaves Pyramid practitioners open to malpractice suits along with their felony charges.
Then there are the scags, holons and architypes.
- Holons — in Wydra’s world a holon is a pyramid-shaped hierarchy “where all components must be in place for the individual to be able to achieve goals.” Pyramid holons have psychobabble names (Self-Actualization, for example) or pseudo-Chinese names (for a hint of the exotic). Wydra’s system doesn’t have any relation to the scientific philosophy or how it is used in biology and systems theory. It’s the Placebo Effect with pseudoscientific jargon.
- Archityping — a process and a tool. A floor wax and a dessert topping.
- Scag — Ironically, this term is slang for heroin, for someone who constantly borrows things with no intention of returning them, and a Pyramid School tool “that uncovers gender roles, social economic status, support systems, generation and historical references, and positive and negative geographical/ geological conditions.”
Why do Pyramid people need so much information for their feng shui? Well, they really don’t, for their glorified interior decorating service — and in several states this amount of information in the hands of unlicensed and unauthorized businesses is illegal because of privacy laws. Before you have a session with a Pyramid School consultant, know your privacy rights, because they don’t care about privacy laws!
Wydra says her school accepts theories "that have either scientific proof or are supported by a belief system" (according to Designing Your Happiness 1995:17). Their marketing literature features a lot of “Dr” name-dropping to sway the credulous. Don’t be fooled: when she says “scientific proof” she really means belief-based. FSIA marketing uses the phrase Western beliefs and values as code words for Nativist thinking and Western occultism mixed in with pseudoscientific blather and psychobabble.
Given FSIA’s cultural and geographic proclivities, Pyramid School feng shui is merely one more McFengshui greenwash.
FSIA encourages degrees in fields Wydra thinks are related to feng shui (baubiology, social work and psychobiology). Actually, bizarre is not too strong a word for many of Wydra’s ideas.
Her belief system and unique ideas about science cast a long shadow over her credibility, though she bills herself as "a master cultural interpreter," "a pioneer who has challenged a complete set of cultural beliefs," and "the Nan Landers [sic] of Feng Shui." (Click here for information on the real Nan Landers.)
I intended to say that
Consider Wydra’s belief that intention alone can be enough to produce change. In Look Before you Love (1998:v) she declares that in science this is called the Heidelberg Principle, a "phenomenon" where "the mere fact of being observed changes … results."
Her confusion about quantum mechanics is based on a misunderstanding of the Heisenberg Principle (also known as the uncertainty principle), named after Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-1976).
Some people, including Wydra, think the uncertainty principle means the world is unpredictable when actually the opposite is true. The uncertainty (Heisenberg) principle is a recipe for making measurements with a precision that would be unimaginable with classical physics.
Quantum mechanics, the centerpiece of modern physics, is misinterpreted as implying that the human mind controls reality and that the universe is one connected whole that cannot be understood by the usual reduction to parts.
However, no compelling argument or evidence requires that quantum mechanics plays a central role in human consciousness or provides instantaneous, holistic connections across the universe. Modern physics, including quantum mechanics, remains completely materialistic and reductionistic while being consistent with all scientific observations.
— Victor J. Stenger: “Quantum Quackery”
Besides the malapropism, Wydra confused the uncertainty principle with the participatory anthropic principle, which is used by people like Deepak Chopra to suggest humans can create molecules by thinking.
Robert Park in his excellent book Voodoo Science (2000) notes this concept suggests that psychic healing and casting spells rely on chaos theory, and quantum mechanics supplies the summoned spirits. It gives a new spin to The Tempest, in which Shakespeare tackled the thorny issues of colonialism and racism.
Only left-handers are in their right minds
For Wydra, a bagua is predicated on the idea that right and left share inherent meanings across cultures, but she qualifies this idea by repeating her culture’s myths about brain functions. (Corvallis and Beale 1983: viii)
A bagua, stresses Wydra, works by analogy as a conceptual map of our psyche, as a glimpse into our thought processes. The right side of the brain, she says, controls emotion and abstract thinking while the left side handles "the practical aspects of cognition."
Armed with these facts, she says,
it is natural to align areas relevant to our emotional life on the right side of the room and areas dedicated to critical thinking on the left.
(Book of Cures: 47-48)
Connect the right side of the house or a room to emotion and relationships, she says. Decorate the left side of a room according to organized and logical mental functions. (Ibid.: 49)
Wydra’s crackpot theories can be found in American pop culture and New Age books. The facts about brain function are just the opposite of her claims.
Although our unconscious and conscious minds exist interdependently, the hemispheres control opposite sides of the human body and function asymmetrically. The right brain registers sensory input from the left side of the body (which, by the way, is traditionally the yang side). The left brain registers sensory input from the right side (which is traditionally the yin side).
In urban folklore, the left hemisphere has assumed much of the character of the military-industrial-entertainment complex with its dominant, linear, coldly rational stereotype. By contrast the spiritual, emotional, compassion-oriented right hemisphere reflects the creative order of the New Age. (Corvallis and Beale: 168)
Though our genetic material is primarily a product of our primate past, humans have asymmetrical brains. The brains of most right-handers exhibit a counterclockwise torque. (Ibid.: 138-139)
The left hemisphere gives us rhythm and the ability to judge simultaneity, temporal order and duration, in addition to fine motor control (something women are especially good at). Ibid.: 174
Across cultures, human females appear to be superior to males in verbal ability (also a left-hemisphere activity).
Most left-handed people around the world are male, disabled learners, schizophrenics, epileptics, and hyperactive. Ibid.: 207 Was that why ancient Chinese codified yang as being left-handed?
I think…therefore the idea stinks
Wydra also promotes the outdated Christian belief that sentience and consciousness are uniquely human — although scientific evidence doesn’t agree with her. Read Daniel Dennett’s book on consciousness, and the works of Antonio Damasio.
Because Christianity elevated humans to rule over our closest genetic relatives (chimpanzees, bonobos, and other primates) along with the rest of the natural world, humans stand at the apex of Pyramid School ideology with only a fuzzy "unknown" higher than humans on Wydra’s Great Chain of Being.
Read Wydra’s books and articles with a great deal of skepticism. She has contributed as many crackpot theories to American pop culture as Erich von Daniken and Pat Robertson.
