A moving, simple spiritual autobiography.
A monk’s tale of misery leading to freedom.
In straightforward prose, Sheng Yen (Orthodox Chinese Buddhism, 2007, etc.) relates his odyssey from hand-to-mouth childhood in 1930s China to lecturing around the world as a premier Chan (or Zen) Buddhist scholar. Becoming a monk was anything but simple for the author, who lived through a time when Buddhist monasteries in China were frequently destroyed. He weaves his personal story of religious yearning and perseverance into a backdrop of political and social turmoil. He was a 19-year-old monk in training when the communist takeover forced him to flee the idyllic life he’d only begun to cherish. He landed in the nationalist army in Taiwan, an unlikely and ill-fitting job for a man who had pledged to avoid harming sentient beings. Nourished by his early training and the few Buddhist texts he could acquire, Sheng Yen began writing religious essays for an influential, necessarily underground Buddhist periodical called Humanity. He steadily built a reputation under the pen name “World-Awakening General.” After years of postponing his calling because of political circumstances, he finally made it out of the army in 1960 and entered a monastery to study Chan Buddhism under a particularly wily, demanding master. Once he learned to stop questioning the unpredictable and exasperating tasks his master assigned, he began a period of seclusion, finally gaining access to the copious library of Buddhist scholarship for which he had longed. His first-person account of China’s communist revolution focuses on practical details, favoring descriptions of meals, clothing and brief encounters over sweeping theoretical generalizations. Although the account unfolds in a charmingly unsophisticated way, its best audience would be those already knowledgeable about Buddhism and familiar with Sheng Yen’s work, for he spares little time explaining rituals and beliefs.
A moving, simple spiritual autobiography.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-51330-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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