Attempting to extract lessons for daily living from the emerging science of
chaos theory, Briggs, a professor of English at Western Connecticut State
University, and Peat, a British physicist, have produced an often frustrating,
intermittently suggestive guide. Chaos scientists seek hidden patterns
underlying apparently random events. By heeding their example, the authors
maintain, ordinary folk can learn to appreciate the interconnectedness of all
things, to go with the flow of events, to unlock creativity through heightened
tolerance for ambiguity and ambivalence, to pay attention to subtlety, to act
according to one's internal rhythms. Skipping fluidly from irrational numbers
to Zen paradoxes, from Vaclav Havel's notion of "the power of the powerless"
to the I Ching to the egalitarian, "self-organizing" interactions of an
Ojibway Indian community and Manhattan's food distribution system, the authors
use chaos as an overworked metaphor in a barrage of analogies, speculative
leaps, platitudes and anecdotes. Their unconvincing manual is riddled with
sentences like, "Positive butterfly power involves a recognition that each
individual is an indivisible aspect of the whole and that each chaotic moment
of the present is a mirror of the chaos of the future." Scores of intriguing
photographs (66 b&w; eight pages color), which form an integral part of the
book, reinforce points about the dynamics of change and the liberating
potential of chaos with images of colliding galaxies, Ice Age cave paintings,
a traffic jam, a craggy British coastline, plots of heart rhythms.

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