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It's a chicken-or-the-egg kind of argument do you need to know about the writer's personal life to appreciate his or her work? Or, as many literary purists feel, should the writing stand alone and unvarnished by biographical detail? In the case of Stephanie...

I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing. By Brian Kitely. Simon & Schuster. 191 pages. $20. Brian Kitely, author of the much-praised "Still Life with Insects," sets the tone for his second novel in its dreamlike, poetic title. Set in modern-day Egypt...

When are coaches and players going to learn that they can't turn momentum on and off like a light switch? Momentum, once lost, is not always retrievable at will. In fact, it is quite illusive. Although Coach Tony Dungy and his Indianapolis Colts won the Super...

Investors want to invest in the best companies. But how do you define best?IndexIQ, a one-year-old newcomer, claims these qualitative characteristics can be quantified. It has created indexes that group the best companies based on qualities such as innovation, power, growth, productivity, work force leadership,...

It would not be quite accurate to say that the material in Illusions is shopworn, but it is becoming common currency in the reading offered to American mass audiences: enlightenment, miracles, reincarnation, out-of-body experiences…. There is nothing particularly wrong with [Bach's] anecdotal enlightenment, except that there is nothing particularly right about it either. It leaves the recipient where he was before the process began, except that he may have a dim recognition of the existence of...

As serious religion, "Illusions" does not even begin to be anything more than [fantasy literature]. The twin problems of purpose and evil with which religion has traditionally wrestled are not even addressed, but dismissed as illusory. If religion is the modest dogma that God is not mad, then "Illusions" is an irreligious book, because it suggests that it doesn't matter whether He is or not. Nor do the simple ethical imperatives of Shimoda do justice to humankind's ...

I guess a lot of things that are said in ["Illusions"] are the kind of sentences somebody might want to embroider on a sampler—or bake into a fortune cookie. Bach seems sincere—he even ends up a messiah himself in the book and says there's room at the top for everybody. Maybe there's some truth in this—I can't really tell one way or another. My own inclination after reading it was to think up some sayings of my own like, "If this book helps get ...