Spinning Straw Into Gold is exactly what its subtitle says: straight talk for troubled times. It offers no formula for success, as it is traditionally defined, and no promise that you can shape your destiny by the power of your mind. Goals such as these, in the view of the author, only reflect the spiritual emptiness of contemporary American life.

What the book does offer is one man's meditation on the meaning of his life to date, and an opportunity for the reader to reflect on the meaning of his or her own life in turn. Success, i.e., living in reality, demands an awareness of the depth and complexity of that life: a coming to terms with it as it actually exists, with all its strange contradictions and surprising twists of fate. Spinning Straw into Gold is thus not a feel-good book. Rather it is a search-your-soul and ponder-your-being book. For those who have the courage to allow it to stimulate true reflection, it may be rewarding in unexpected ways. It is for those who seek richness in reality, rather than in the pipe dreams of mass society, that this book is written.