Book Review 2/200 2022- 3/5 - 'The Business of Redemption', James Arthur Ray - Non-Fiction - Auto-Biography

On a ranch outside of Sedona Arizona, 8th October 2009, more than 50 seminar attendees of one James Arthur Ray, self-help guru approached the conclusion of a 5-Day 'Spiritual Warrior' seminar they all paid in excess of over $10,000 to attend. The event was gruelling, having already asked attendees to shave their heads, meditate without food or water in the desert for days, they were asked to endure one more exercise. A sweat lodge ceremony for the seminar's finale...

Every participant would be ushered into a makeshift dome and endure moisture-soaked, crowded, extreme heat while Ray sat at the dome's one and and only entrance. The ceremony went downhill very quickly. By nightfall, people were screaming for help and hallucinating in the middle of the desert. A first responder would describe the scene like something out of Jonestown. Three people sadly died from heatstroke, 18 others were hospitalised.

Ray was since convicted of negligent homicide and spent two years in prison. Before his fall, you may have recognised Ray from the sensation The Secret. The infamous film and book that re-ignited the self-help movement.

The Business of Redemption is Ray's experience of that tragic day, prison and the lessons he's garnered from his reflections since. The book reads like a Freudian couch therapy session with the man rationalising his actions. At times it seems he's convinced that people were worth dying for him to become the illumined man he's re-emerged as today. At the very end, Ray complains that many publishers wouldn't like to take a punt on his great story, that needed to be told, because it lacked something very important: a comeback.

Despite Ray's obvious ambition and assurance that he's deeply remorseful and sorry for his actions, redemption isn't a magic bullet and certainly not a business.