Newsweek

The Powerless
Rhonda Byrne, author of ‘The Secret,’ has a new book called ‘The Power,’ which claims you can get anything by believing in it. Don’t believe it.
by Jerry AdlerAugust 20, 2010

In the world of publishing, a self-help author who manages to stop after one book is as rare as a poet who gets booked onto Larry King. Sooner or later, even those whose first books claimed to encapsulate all of human philosophy since Aristotle go scrounging for leftover insights that can propel them back to the top of the bestseller lists. Take the erstwhile Australian television producer Rhonda Byrne, whose monumental 2006 bestseller The Secret laid bare “the law that determines the complete order in the Universe, every moment of your life, and every single thing you experience.” Following that—and The Secret Gratitude Book (2007) and The Secret Daily Teachings (2008)—what more was there to say?

Enough, it turns out, to half fill the 250 extremely small pages of her new opus, The Power, which the day after publication this week ranked in the top five on Amazon. This was in spite of Byrne’s apparent refusal to give interviews or publicize the book in any way, a subject of some speculation in publishing circles. It’s easy to dismiss someone like Byrne as a marginal crackpot, but The Secret has 19 million copies in print, according to her publisher, Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. To put it another way, about eight times as many people shelled out money for Rhonda Byrne’s thoughts as listen to Glenn Beck’s for free (in an average week). Maybe we ought to pay more attention to what she has to say.