The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

Rhonda
Byrne, author of the self-help bestseller The Secret, strikes again with
a sequel titled The Power. With very few differences, the second installment
continues what the first book started – explaining the power of the law of
attraction. 

The Power reveals through the first few pages that this power
is love. Byrne argues that you should be open to happiness and that everything
that happens to you is a result of your own feelings. However, the author’s
ideas are very repetitive; she keeps stating the same theories over and over
again, making it a labour to read through.

The Power could have been summed up in one magazine article
rather than having an entire book devoted to it. You can skip pages at a time
and still be able to grasp the main idea.  

The Power is an attempt by the author to crawl back onto the bestseller
list. Unfortunately, The Power is not
what it promises to be. It is supposed to be empowering, but it fails in that aspect. Also, readers may not necessarily agree with many of the ideas that it’s
based on.

The book includes a lot of quotable pieces of advice. The
gist of The Power is that if you give
love, you receive love. If you think happy thoughts, everything will start
falling your way. Believing in something is the first step to getting it; but
there’s also a lot of hard work involved, an idea that the author has failed to
tackle.  

Byrne has succeeded in offering the kind of basic
ideas that everyone should take heed of; yet the examples that she cites to support
her arguments are feeble and unconvincing. To exemplify, Byrne writes that
researches have found that the structure of water becomes more harmonious when
it is exposed to feelings of love and gratitude.  

The author also tends to generalise. In her opinion,
you can get whatever you want, from landing your dream job to finding your
significant other, by wishing for it and pretending that you already have it. She
claims that if you want to find your perfect partner, you only need to pretend
that you already have a partner. She suggests that you set the table for two
when preparing dinner and sleep on one side of the bed. This may not find you
your soul mate; but it might force you to question your own sanity.

According to The Power, positive attracts
positive and negative thoughts attract negative situations. But, wait a minute,
doesn’t science say that opposites
attract?