Customer comments on this Youngstown Ohio Book
 Knowledge with understanding is close to wisdom ***
This book gets 5 stars for its research effort and zero for wisdom. The author spent a whole day interviewing Werner on Sept. 15, 1991. Too bad this lady author didn't publish her 7-hour taped conversation with Werner. May be her next book?
Interesting that another lady wrote a review on the 3rd anniversary of 911. May be like 911 the lady read the book too quickly and didn't notice that this lady author has already provided the answers to her question in the book.
The first 2 daughters retracted their story while the third one most probably with cohesion with her husband disappeared.
What I find funny is that Werner bothered to take a lie detector test before the March 3, 1991 CBS show. In reality even before the show Werner made preparation to leave the country & EST. The gift of that 60-minutes was to re-enforce the already started process of Werner leaving EST in the hands of the capable hands of his trained coaches that were to form Landmark & Forum.
Just like certain people can see the benefit of Dalai Lama forced to leave Tibet in order to spread the Tibetan version of Buddhism with all its mystical illusions.
As to why his own 3 out of 7 children proclaimed that their natural deserting daddy is a child molester on the 60-min show can be easily explained by Werner's 'own fall from heaven story' which is described in my review of "Werner Erhard Transformation of a man: the founding of EST". That is simple, 44 years later, cause and effect and an example of the pervasiveness of every one's own 'fall from heaven story' in one's own life.
Because of that gift, EST & FORUM can't be said to be cult, since the founder disbanded EST & is now only a researcher that's drawing his revenues from his rigidly crafted & copyrighted course design.
Only a few of the Forum attendees and even coaches bother to read Werner's biography or even heard of his name. By definition a cult must be around a central figure, like Bush's son or Reagan or Hitler, etc, who is supposedly providing central security and correctness for all participants while at the same time at war with all non-participants in the name of future equality and peace. Instead of present equality and peace.
I saw when I met Werner in Japan in 1996, he was being served food while his close attendants were sat with no food in front of them. This is the only thing I didn't like about the hierarchy of coaches vs. attendees or volunteers. There is no equality.
Although I do understand & appreciate that the coaches in 1996, now more to 50 of them according to LandmarkEducation, earned only a paltry $50k annual salary for their original effort and real contribution to humankind. I don't see any reason that they're treated as upper-class, like the apprenticeship for the very hierarchical Japan's Sumo wrestlers or Japan's own very untouchables Buraku sect or any royalty or upper-classmanship. That's feudalism not wisdom.
Werner by choosing Japan, without China. as its audience is making the same mistake as Gandhi. Gandhi chose to use his life energy of non-violence toward the English establishment and could have also chosen for breaking through India's more than 2,000 years tradition of inequality as preserved in the various sects from Brahman to Untouchables. A longer lasting & larger contribution to humankind.
Naturally although "equality" is the cry for emancipation of all revolutions from the Bastille to the US Declaration of Independence to the Communist revolutions the world over. Once the revolutions were over, there was no more mention of "equality"! Why? Is it to preserve the new status quo of a new upper class instead of what the revolution called for EQUALITY?
 Get A Clue
What nonsense. Don't believe me? See if you can find anything else written by author "Jane Self, PhD" And check out the rest of the catalog from "Breakthru Publishing." If you think Werner Erhard was run out of town by the scientologists, ask him why he "made himself a victim," or "created his own victimization," why don't you? This is just another feeble attempt salvage or rewrite or rearrange the facts of his - Werner Erhard's - sleazy reputation. Est "acolytes" and Landmark "followers" are so desperate to prop up an image of their hero they will believe anything. Even this kind of garbage.
 So what happened next?
The book is well researched and collects plenty of hard to find information in one place. The narrative connects the dots in a way the leaves Erhard's reputation intact (using Erhard's meaning of reputation, relayed somewhere in the book), even as we watch his media image go from bad to terrible. This is an important contribution to the historical record. No matter how cynical one is about Erhard, he deserves to have a say in how the story of his own life gets told (even as he works to remain above the "soap opera" in his philosophical outlook).
'60 Minutes' got its chance. Now we get a low budget response by a journalist who is up front about her agenda.
I'm writing this in 2004, long after the events in this book transpired. Charlene Afermow, mentioned in the book as a member of the anti-Erhard camp (and one my trainers -- Walter Kaufmann and David Raymond enrolled me at Princeton in the late 1970s), is still with Landmark as I understand it (my friend Sara says she led her advanced course). That's interesting. How did that defamation lawsuit filed by Werner's lawyer in a Chicago court turn out? In the book, it's still pending, as was one of the tax court cases.
Again, regardless of one's opinion of Erhard, whether based on first hand knowledge, or a picture of human nature and gurudom in general, he is/was a pivotal figure in my life time. A lot of energy was expended by a lot of people around the programs and organizations he worked to establish, for better or for worse (my own opinion is for better).
I also wonder if Self (the author) has an overly limited view of the scope of the anti-Erhard camp. Sure, the Scientology organization was out to get him at many levels (not true of all scientologists), but perhaps he was considered a threat by others as well -- a global network, connections in the Soviet bloc, rubbing shoulders with policy makers, and in the 1980s, the overlap with Buckminster Fuller. I could see this making a lot of people uncomfortable, besides Church of Scientology execs.
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