Michael Puett & Christine Gross-Loh
The Path: A New Way to Think about Everything
(Penguin, 2017)
This purports to be a self-help book of a new kind: one which encourages us to change our philosophy, and hence our actions, by doing small, simple things. As the cover blurb says:

The first book of its kind, The Path offers a profound guide to living well. It reveals for the first time how the timeless wisdom of ancient Chinese philosophers can transform the way we think about ourselves. Covering subjects from decision-making to relationships, it shows how making small changes in our everyday routines – as simple as showing weaknesses in meetings or greeting people differently – can make us happier and more productive.

The idea is good and the book should have been interesting, but I found it facile and superficial: like cheap brawn, lots of aspic with very little meat. I had to give up on it half way through.
As Ambrose Bierce once commented in a review “The covers of this book are too far apart”. It is a book of 200 pages, which frankly should have been no more than a third of that.
First off it suffers from the current publishing malaise of an over-large typeface, excessive leading, and wider than needed margins; ie. much too much white space. It is also, typically of Penguin, printed on appallingly cheap and nasty paper which is not going to withstand the ravages of time.
But for me, worse than all that, it is written is a very simplistic, almost dumbed-down, laborious style which I found it hard to read – it is so wishy-washy I had trouble picking out the key concepts. Consequently it gave me nothing to think about and take away. It needed a robust editor.
In a way I don’t blame the authors: the concepts are sound and the content would be a good subject of a single philosophy seminar. But it isn’t a book, and for that the publishers have to shoulder the blame.
Overall Rating: ★☆☆☆☆