In recounting his life story, Das (born Michael Riggs) takes readers on a romp through mystical India and some of its countercultural counterparts in the US. Das first entered publishing history as one of the subjects of a book called Be Here Now (1971), by his fellow American traveler in Eastern life and thought, Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert). The two met in India, where Alpert found Das to be a spiritual guide of great value. (His Hindu name, meaning ``Servant of God,'' was conferred on him by his guru, Neem Karoli Baba.) Among the several paths to enlightenment in the wide world of Hinduism, Das chose the devotional way (called bhakti), which cultivates, through prayer, meditation, and chant, intense communion with one of the Hindu deities. The deity of choice here is the goddess Kali, a personification of the Cosmic Mother. Kali is a stern task-mistress and, according to Das, punishes him harshly over the wastrel ways and promiscuous sex he falls into on his return to America. Happily, in the end he recovers his balance, offering a peaceful synthesis of beliefs incorporating the Hindu-Buddhist East and Christian West. Along the way, the author describes, in breezy conversational style, encounters with such eminent spiritual seekers as Allen Ginsberg, whose poem on Das opens the book, and many out-of-body experiences and drug-facilitated ecstasies. More memorably, the first part of his narrative, set in India, offers a colorful, insider's view of devotional Hinduism in its native land. But even Kali must grimace when, back in America (in the book's second part), Das excuses his careless relations with women on the grounds that the goddess is his one true love. Das fleshes out the teachings of devotional Hinduism with his own vivid experiences, but sometimes forgets that in narrative art, as in spiritual life, self-justification blocks the light. (40 b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-7679-0008-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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