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This is a book that I can warmly recommend to all those who want to deepen their personal experience. Like the Book of Job, Dr. Kahn's book does not only inform and interpret but also facilitates the growth of new thoughts in the reader's mind.
The author has been growing with the book for the past twenty-five years and at the end of the Introduction he writes:-
“The most difficult task was to bring the book to a conclusion. Even after depositing the manuscript with the publishers, new ideas came to notice and new comparisons came to mind. My hope is that readers will be able to take over some of the pleasure of the discovery of new growing points.”
This has certainly been so in my own case. The new ideas it has stirred press to be formulated and written down. But a reviewer does both the author of a book, and the readers of a review, a disservice if he merely uses the review of a book as an opportunity to expound his own ideas. So let me tell you what the book is about without interposing my own thoughts too much and without spoiling your prospects of a good “read”, for this book is eminently readable and thought-provoking without being sententious and “heavy”.
The book begins with the Book of Job presented in full. Dr. Kahn then proceeds to discuss the way in which the perfectionist Job, (“a man of blameless and upright life”), has to go through the spiritual crisis which is inevitable if a compulsive and obsessional character is to free himself from his too rigid conformity to established tradition and his stereotyped, legalistic and mechanical responses. The writing is completely free from technical jargon and there is no patronising “looking down” on Job as a psychiatric case. Rather one feels that Dr. Kahn is using Job's experience to work through his own deep personal “mid-life” crisis, as indeed, William Blake seemed to use the story of Job, by representing the stages through which he passed, in a series of drawings. Kahn uses these fascinating drawings at appro