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Outrageous
Betrayal : The Real Story of Werner Erhard from Est to
Exile
by Steven Pressman
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"Mud-slinging expos‚ of the notorious pop guru
who ``got it''- -and then tried to give it to the rest
of the world. As his title makes clear, Pressman (a
former writer for California Lawyer) makes no pretense
to objectivity here: His Werner Erhard is a charismatic
but abusive con man with a genius for repackaging and
marketing others' ideas. Erhard, he tells us, was born
in 1935 Pennsylvania as ``Jack Rosenberg''; grew up to
be a married car-salesman with kids; fell in love and
remarried, committing bigamy; changed his name to Werner
Erhard; and moved with his new wife to California.
There, while selling encyclopedias door-to-door, Erhard
hooked up with Scientology and a teaching method called
Mind Dynamics, then broke away to begin est. Within two
years, est had expanded into a multimillion-dollar
business whose confrontational, allegedly
transformational, techniques had been sold to tens of
thousands, including many celebrities. Pressman
highlights est's little-known debt to Scientology and
Mind Dynamics; traces the outfit's byzantine, perhaps
shady, financial structure; emphasizes Erhard's
sybaritic way of life and cult of personality; and
hammers home the guru's bullying side--which, at its
ugliest, may have led him to beat his wife and molest
his daughters. What the author dramatically fails to
provide by bearing down on the negative (to the extent
that nearly all his informants denounce est and its
founder) is any real understanding of est's
teachings--and of why they appealed so deeply to so
many. Today, Erhard, escaping bad publicity, is in
exile, his whereabouts apparently unknown to the press,
including Pressman: a suitably shadowy stage in the life
of a man who remains an enigma despite a dogged telling
here of what, surely, is only half the story. --
Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights
reserved."
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