Word: pecked
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Think of him as Dan Quayle with brains and a degree in psychiatry. Call him God's golfer. It's hard not to roll your eyes when M. Scott Peck, M.D., personal-enrichment guru to the nation's conflicted upper middle class, author of The Road Less Traveled, a self-help manual whose sales have placed it on the New York Times best-seller list for the past 566 weeks, announces that he is sponsoring a $10,000-a-foursome golf tournament to promote "spirituality, golf and the fine art of business management." Business biggies will tee off this weekend...
...says Peck, an addicted and "struggling" golfer, who admits that his sport is "seemingly silly" but feels that its "blend of agony and ecstasy, work and play, caution and risk, painful serious learning and exuberant relaxation" offers something like an 18-hole way to enlightenment. Peck doesn't exactly say that if Jesus were to return to earth, he would have a 3 handicap, but wisdom and baloney might be added to his list just after agony and ecstasy. Both qualities are evident in his writings and his personality, though a surprising range of critics clearly feel that what predominates...
...Peck wrote his The Road Less Traveled in 1978, and it is still racking up some $300,000 a year in royalties. It is an earnest and generally inoffensive advice book that begins with the admission that "life is difficult" and stipulates immediately that "without discipline we can solve nothing." Its astonishing appeal may not be that people actually read it and are elevated. Rather, it appears, they buy it to give to irritating friends. Making a present of The Road Less Traveled has become a socially acceptable way of saying, "Estelle, your insulation is beginning to char." Everyone knows...
...author, who has written several other self-help best sellers, now says that Road bores him, "but that's where the money is." Mildly cynical wisecracks of this kind seem merely to assure believers that Peck is a regular guy, as do revelations that he smokes, and drinks fairly heavily. At 58 he is trying to scale back his incessant speaking engagements to about 25 a year, at $15,000 apiece. But the guru business, like the Mafia, is hard to retire from. He and his wife Lily generally suffer his adulators tolerantly, but they have been heard to refer...
...such restraint uncommon? Maybe not. "Formost, virginity-'tilmarriage was still the norm(from which deviations did occur) and notnecessarily felt as childishness to be trashed atthe first opportunity. In '44, The Pill wasunheard of, and God was still a He. Unless you hada married lady's arcane information, chastityprevented peck of troubles. (You didn't have tolike it. Many complained...