The Philosopher King

The Philosopher King
Ronnie Lee
Outskirts Press
ISBN: 978-1432735814
Non-Fiction, Poetry
Reviewed by Muhammed Hassanali

When I read the book’s description I was expecting something more like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. In The Philosopher King also has free verse like The Prophet but here is where the similarities end. The Philosopher King is divided into eleven chapters titled Business (Chapter 1), Money (Chapter 2), Politics and Government (Chapter 3), Leadership (Chapter 4), Philosophy of Survival (Chapter 5), Morality (Chapter 6), Feelings (Chapter 7), Psychology and Spirit (Chapter 8), Conspiracy, Horror and Terror (Chapter 9), Science (Chapter 10) and Existentialism (Chapter 11). Each chapter contains several titled poems, and each poem is several pages long. As can be anticipated, the book is more than 700 pages long.

Discovering nuggets of wisdom was challenging as the poems are so long and tend to meander. As in some traditional works from the Orient, the poems here provide lists and mathematical equations leaving the reader to wonder if the list is complete or if the equation presented is a true representation of the world. While the poems provide these lists and equations, they do not build on them or explore how they were derived; hence the appeal of any given poem is predicated on how well the poem’s view point resonates with that of the reader.

While the book does provide readers with a noble worldview, it does not offer compelling arguments to buttress its views. In the end, my disappointment stems more from the disconnect between my expectations of this type of work and what the book actually offered. I was looking for a work that would be closer to the styles used in Plato’s dialogues or Khusraw’s Knowledge and Liberation.