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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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