At first glance, the New Hermetics is just a stripped down Golden Dawn. Everything you need to go from Neophyte (initiate) to Adept is covered in about 150 pages.

Personally, its a little too 'fast food' for me. Its kind of like the Cicero's Self Initiation book for severe ADD sufferers. But It's not exactly Golden Dawn either. The Theoricus grade has been removed (since the book seems to conentrate more on practice than theory, I guess Newcomb decided it wasn't needed), so Initiate is Earth, Zelator (Zealot) is Air and so on.. There is no Portal grade. Alchemy is summed up in two pages and three diagrams. The Tree of Life gets 10 pages. Newcomb does incorporate Neuro-Linguistic programming and the works of Jung and Leary into the book, which is an interesting and reasonable approach. He also states that to go from soup to nuts in this process will (i.e. from Zealot to Adept) will take 'just a few weeks or months' because the dogma has been eliminated.

It is true there is a lot of detail in the Golden Dawn that may be unneccessary, but this book seems to represent the opposite extreme. Also, it seems to have a little of that salesy 'Dale Carnegie - How to lose friends and irritate people' kind of feel to the prose.

I'm not saying its a bad book - not at all. It could be a useful high level introduction to Hermeticism, and it is conceivable that everything you need to know can be summarized in this fashion. But there is something to be said for taking time with your journey. A goal that can be quickly achieved lessens in value.

All that being said, the book does have a foreword by Lon Milo Duquette, someone I have a lot of respect for. His endorsement of this book suggests it may be worth investigating.