Customer Reviews

Public Like a Frog: Entering the Lives of Three Great Americans (Emily Dickinson, Thomas Jefferson, Helen Keller)

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I've read Jean Houston before, as well as once having belonged to a group that went through her whole "Mind Games" program, and been very impressed, sometimes to a life-changing degree, by the power of her novel, somewhat offbeat, spiritual approach. Offbeat enough that Houston usually can't comment to a general audience on any of the issues into which she has useful insights without prefacing her remarks with remarks on exactly who and what she is herself, as one of those unclassifiable intellectual outliers intelligent and versatile enough to be able to hear your drumbeat, when she needs to, in addition to the different one she normally marches to. As it happens, I'm also a poet and a huge fan of Emily Dickinson, whom I rank as America's greatest poet to date. Needless to say, finding a book about the one woman written by the other made it a title I could hardly wait to get my hands on. As a matter of fact, having read the Emily portion, I have not even gotten round to reading the Jefferson and Helen Keller parts yet, though they should be a pleasure if they are as good as the Emily section.

PUBLIC LIKE A FROG, from a line from Emily Dickinson's "I'm nobody -- who are you?" is actually a workbook from some of the coursework of Houston's Mystery School, with a great deal of introductory and instructional discussion on how it is to be used, as a manual of guided personal meditations modeled on the life stories of these three personalities. A lot of Houston's techniques are based on insights you may hope to gain through the experiences of being, for a little while, not yourself but someone else, and what you could learn by looking at yourself and the world through their eyes rather than your own. It's all very zen and, in my own experience, highly effective, even life-transformative at times. That was not, however, the approach I took this time around, merely reading the book for enjoyment instead.

And quite enjoyable it is. Houston is talented as a writer, as well as in many other arts, and I can only think of one other book on Emily, just offhand, that comments more powerfully on her and her poetry. Along the way of things Houston necessarily has a lot to say about the poet, her life, her family and her art, and it's obvious that Houston's research here has been first class and up to date. She even renders Emily's poetry as Emily herself did, rather than in the heavily edited versions of so many earlier editions. I can't say I entirely agree with some of Houston's takes, such as her interpretations of the personalities of Emily's father and grandfather, but neither did such differences of opinion take all that much spin off the pleasure of the book for me. Used as intended, I fully expect the book could shine some powerful spotlights onto tracks less traveled in any seeker's spirituality. Even just casually read for edification and pleasure, though, it's a fun and funny read from the pen of a most unusual thinker and a very smart woman, about a most unusual thinker and a very smart woman.