Rating: 
Summary: in God we trust-fund
Review: This book was an enjoyable exploration of what money means to us and what it stands for...and why it has fallen into the cultural shadow.The author makes a convincing explanation for the numinous power of wealth, a power partly due to the fact that two thousand years of Christianity turned away from matter and the body, which have now had their revenge via the symbol of the almighty dollar, America's real religion. I almost gave this book a 3 because 1. it has no index, and I hate that; and 2. no effort was made to edit out gender-biased language ("man," "the nature of man," etc.). Oh, and 3. the publisher needs to spend more on the paper: it's no good for penciling notes on. I'm not certain that the question of the integrity of one's work comes down to the quality of one's attention, as the author seems to maintain. The dilemma, say, of a scientist who designs nuclear weapons and then realizes one day--perhaps when jobs are scarce--that the work is eating up his soul even though it supports his family becomes a real dilemma, not only a problem of the ego that vanishes in the light of understanding. Doing a job he feels to be evil consciously doesn't make it any less evil to him; and consciously quitting and letting his family starve while he looks for work hugely impacts them. In fact, it's his heightened awareness and its unwillingness to "turn away from truth" that deprives him of his ability to feel good about his integrity no matter what he decides. Needleman is right, though, that we must make peace with our relationship with money if we're to heal the split between our physical requirements and our thirst for meaning. To do that we need more, not less, "materialism," a more conscious probing into matter, the body, the things of the world, which today's electronicized economics have gone far toward dematerializing. The book reminds me a bit of a quotation by Walter Kaufmann, who wrote about Shakespeare's solution to the dilemma of vocation vs. occupation (remember that, like Beethoven, the world's pre-eminent playwright was also an efficient businessman): It has almost become a commonplace that the modern artist
has lost contact with his audience and that the public no
longer supports him as in previous ages...Shakespeare came
to terms with the obtuseness of his public: he gave his pearls
a slight odor of the sty before he cast them. Far from cheap-
ening his art, he turned the challenge of a boorish, lecherous,
and vulgar audience to advantage and increased the richness
and the subtlety of tragedy so vastly that age cannot wither it,
nor custom stale its infinite variety. -- Kaufmann, FROM SHAKESPEARE TO EXISTENTIALISM
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