A reviewer above described this work as "remarkably inane" and full of "stereotypes", and while I would agree with this, I would like to expand on this a bit.

First, it should be pointed out that books treating academics through the eye of the Winnie-the-Pooh story are somewhat of a cottage industry, and that some of these books are quite amusing and somewhat informative. It was due to my good experiences with these other books that I decided to pick this up, despite the fact that as a student of sinology, I was well aware of the type of drivel that has been written about Taoism.

Unfortunately for this book, the book ends up as a stereotypical reduction of Taoism into a "feel good" ideology to fit the 70's lifestyle. An even worse offense is that the book is just not funny, and not even really slightly amusing. I expected to be annoyed as a student of Chinese, because the Taoist writings are thrown in mish-mash, with no explanation of the historical origins of Taoism, and no explanation of the various branches of Taoism (ie, religious, philosophical or magical taoism. Taoism is presented as a single uncarved block that can't be critiqued and analyzed. I could write a bit about cultural foiling and othering, but the book doesn't really warrant it.

The real sin of the book is writing a book about how to be an open, happy person and doing it in a way that comes across as so dogmatic and superior. If someone can read Winnie-the-Pooh and Zhuangzi and still be unfunny, there is not much hope for that person.