Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem.

'SELF-ESTEEM" is currently the bee in every bonnet and the fork in every tongue, so it was only to be expected that Gloria Steinem, the divine afflatus of feminism who has made a career out of leading the herd to trendy saltlicks, would decide to take a crack at it. She took two cracks. The first manuscript she wrote was read by a friend who told her it was too impersonal. "I think you have a self-esteem problem," said the friend. "You forgot to put yourself in."

Of course she forgot. She had been thinking of everyone but herself for years; hopping on planes the moment radical groups needed her, soothing fevered caucuses, tucking in fretful taskforces, living in an apartment with no furniture because she gave all her money away to worthy causes. Her friends called her a "co-dependent with the world," but we of coarser fiber recognize Dickens's Mrs. Jellyby, who made her own children go hungry so she could contribute to the African Children's Milk Fund, and then basked in the accolade, "She does so much for others."

Miss Steinem claims she rewrote the manuscript to include herself, but all we get are four discreet pages about her affair, at fifty, with a fabulously rich tycoon to whom she succumbed, she says, because her self-esteem was at an all-time low, plus a few scattered references to her mother's mental illness that she covered thoroughly in a long essay called "Ruth's Song," published in 1984.

Several mass-circulation reviewers latched on to the 11th-hour affair, giving the impression that the present book is a tell-all confessional about the secret life of Gloria Steinem. It isn't. They fudged, probably to make things easy on themselves, because the book is practically unreviewable; a rambling, monomaniacal exercise in meta-physics a go-go about finding the "inner child" through meditation and achieving cosmic self-esteem in oneness and universality with all things.

She begins by telling us how to say "self-esteem" in other languages. Not content to stop at the French amour-propre, Steinem the compulsive list-maker plows on through Russian, Hindu, classical Greek, Hebrew, Yiddish, Anglo-Saxon (soelf), and, of course, Swahili (kujistahi). Next she reviews the synonyms in Roget's Thesaurus and then drags us on a usage trip through the OED, until the bloodied and beaten reader concludes that concern for self-esteem is not only ubiquitous, but that the world has talked of little else since time began.

Most books have an epigraph--a brief quotation stating the theme or a line of poetry containing the title. This book has 54, drizzled over each chapter and subchapter in clumps of two or three--one chapter has five. The authors of these nuggets include everyone from Socrates to Susan Sontag, with pitstops at arcana like "Sufi Wisdom, from the Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin."

Then there are the supporting quotations. "As Plato believed . . .," "As Margaret Mead observed . . .," "as J. Konrad Stettbacher illustrated . . .," "as Dorothy Dineerstein explains . . .," "as Rilke wrote." One after another; Audre Lorde followed by Christopher Isherwood followed by Allison Stallibrass followed by Franz Kafka followed by Patti Davis, who explains why she used to slouch: "We wear our attitudes in our bodies, and I grew up looking like a question mark." Miss Steinem must look like a colon from the many times she skids to a stop and quotes an ostensible authority out of what is obviously a gnawing fear that she herself lacks the authority to speak her mind without support.

Like the dirty-minded who can turn any topic around to sex, she finds her runic obsession everywhere. The revolt in Estonia was "fueled entirely by self-esteem." And economics? "I've noticed, too, that economists have begun to speak in terms of self-esteem . . . economic development without self-esteem is only another form of colonialism." Living under a white male-dominant society robbed the Cherokees of so much self-esteem that they abandoned their Council of Grandmothers. Women who dot their i's with little hearts in obedience to "the smiling cheerful mask the patriarchy forces them to wear" eventually develop depression and eating problems, which are classic signs of low self-esteem. Saddam Hussein's brutal stepfather robbed him of his self-esteem, so he got it back by brutalizing others until George Bush, whose "aristocratic, religious father" beat him with a belt buckle, salvaged his self-esteem by destroying Saddam's.

Acknowledging congenital differences is bad for self-esteem. The belief that some are blessed with creative talent while others are not is a hierarchical concept, so never admit that you can't draw of sing. That means "I can't meet some outside standard. I'm not acceptable as I am." Go ahead and sing like Roseanne Barr Arnold. Go ahead and write like Diane Ackerman, yet another Steinem quotee: "Each night the sunset surged with purple pampas-grass plumes, and shot fuchsia rockets into the pink sky, then deepened through folded layers of peacock green to all the blues of India and a black across which clouds sometimes churned like alabaster dolls."

How to acquire self-esteem? Turn inward, journey backward in time, "reparent" yourself. To invoke the You of sandboxes past she provides a mantra--"I am valuable," "I am well," or just "I am"--and includes a Meditation Guide:

Take some energizing breaths, inhaling more slowly than you exhale. Count to six as you breathe in, count to three as you breathe out. On the last count, open your eyes. Look at your hands and imagine that a child's hands are inside them. You are one and the same person--but different. You can protect and care for your inner child.

She also provides breathing instructions:

Just press one nostril closed while inhaling deeply through the other for one count, press both nostrils closed while holding that breath for four counts, and then press the other nostril closed while exhaling for two counts. . . . Yoga tells us this time of being full of breath, full of spirit, is a moment of feeling the true self; the soul.

Miss Steinem went to a "time-travel therapist" to find her inner child. She also talks to her hands: "So I ask them what they have to say for themselves. |A banner held in liver-spotted hands,' they reply. I get a title for a future article, plus my first inkling that liver spots have a sense of humor."

Do enough of this and you will be a "Universal I," as one with nature and ready to help the ravaged planet salvage its self-esteem, like "the Chipko movement that began in the Himalayan foothills, when women hugged local village trees to save them from the axe." Being as one with nature is essential, because people who have "dominion" over the beasts of the field do not have self-esteem. To prove that species hierarchy destroys our inner peace she combs through nineteenth-century recipes and finds one that says--are you ready?--"Take a red cock that is not too old and beat him to death."

As a final fillip she recommends the development of Multiple Personality Disorder for positive purposes:

What if we could each gain access to the full range of human qualities that lie suppressed within us? . . . People in different alters can change every body movement, perfect a musical or linguistic talent that is concealed to the host personality, have two or even three menstrual cycles in the same body, and handle social and physical tasks of which they literally do not think themselves capable.

She promises to take us "in concentric circles," and she does. Like most feminist writers, her literary style consists of tossing a word into the water and letting it widen into a sentence. Start with communal, transforming, wholeness, burgeoning, nurturing, synthesizing, sensing, feeling, enhancing, intuiting, invoking, internalizing, seeking, or finding; and you will eventually get a sentence about circadian rhythms, hearing inner "clicks," and looking inward or outwart--through a prism, of course--to where the paradigms are.

Much of the book reads like the contents of a 1972 time capsule. Early Women's Lib themes such as Chinese bound feet continue to haunt her, and the clitoris remains the whistlestop between maidenhead and personhood on her train of thought. Clitoridectomy among the Bantu is still happening, and Miss Steinem is still against it. It's an "excision of sexual will," which is bad for self-esteem, she says, and then quotes Adrienne Rich: "The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far mor essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers."

Self-esteem takes many forms. I read this mewling, puking book, but I'm still vertical and able to quote back. When Samuel Johnson was asked to comment on the plot of Cymbeline, he replied: "It is impossible to criticize unresisting imbecility." My sentiments exactly.

Miss King's new book, With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy (St. Martin's Press), will be published in March.