Irreverent Reviews
The Te of Piglet
Benjamin Hoff · 1992
The sequel nobody's yoga teacher quotes: Hoff trades honey for grievances and accidentally proves the Tao cannot survive a second book deal.
Buy on Amazon →Ten years after The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff went back to the Hundred Acre Wood and tracked mud through it. The premise is lovely: Te, the Taoist idea of virtue or power, as embodied by Piglet—the smallest, most anxious animal in the forest, whose littleness is the very thing that makes him capable of grace. The book sold enormously on the first book's goodwill and sat on the bestseller lists for months. What readers actually got was a Taoist primer interrupted, at escalating volume, by Hoff's opinions about modern media, academia, technology, and apparently everyone who had annoyed him since 1982.
Small Animal, Big Mood
When Hoff stays with the pig, the book glows. Piglet trembles, doubts, and then acts anyway—Milne's stories keep handing the heroics to the smallest body in the room, and Hoff is right that this is Te in its purest cartoon form: power that does not announce itself, courage at the scale of a teacup. A whole book of that would have been a worthy sibling to the first one. There is maybe a third of that book in here.
The Eeyore Effect, Starring the Author
Hoff coins a genuinely useful term—the Eeyore Effect, the culture's addiction to gloom, complaint, and reflexive negativity—and then spends chapter after chapter demonstrating a textbook case of it. The serene voice of 1982 curdles into op-ed: rants arrive, targets multiply, and Piglet stands politely off to the side waiting for his own book to return to him. Somewhere between books, the uncarved block got a grievance file. Critics noticed; so did readers who came for honey and got an editorial page. In 2026 it reads like a Facebook uncle who once did a silent retreat—moments of real calm, interrupted by the rage-share.
“Somewhere between books, the uncarved block got a grievance file.”
Verdict
The first book argued that happiness needs no argument; the sequel argues constantly, and loses to its own thesis. Yet the Piglet material is genuinely tender, and the failure itself is instructive—watch a man write a book about effortlessness, effortfully, and you will learn more about the Tao than he intended to teach. Toast Piglet anyway: small, scared, and braver than his author's mood. May your virtue stay little and your grudges littler.
