SOURCE: “Only Reconnect,” in Nation, Vol. 230, No. 23, June 14, 1980, pp. 727–28, 730.

In the following positive review, Caplan considers the diverse range of essays in Off Center.

“There are only two things in this world,” according to Werner Erhard, founder of the est therapy franchise, “semantics and nothing.” Such careless nihilism, according to Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, dangerously impoverishes the reality we have to share with Erhard, with one another and with our own consciences. In Off Center, a collection of essays written over the course of the 1970s, Harrison looks at Joan Didion's despairing fiction and Adrienne Rich's militant prose, interviews Jane Fonda and Dick Cavett, reviews her own participation in a women's consciousness-raising group and examines other contemporary cultural practices, including est. Nowhere does she find “only two things”; yet sometimes, as in the case of Erhard's dictum, she finds self-indulgence and oversimplification, two things used too often as justification...