A vivid depiction of the powerful religious forces that Rumi transcended to reveal “the sound of one soul speaking.”
An appreciative biography of the 13th-century Persian poet, teacher, and mystic.
In researching the life of Rumi (1207-1273), Gooch (English/William Paterson Univ.; Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard and Art and the ’70s and the ’80s, 2015, etc.) traced the poet’s steps through the Middle East, immersed himself in scholarship, and, impressively, spent years learning Persian in order to translate Rumi’s works and contemporary accounts of a poet who came to achieve enormous international popularity for his “emphasis on ecstasy and love over religions and creeds.” Born into privilege, the son of a religious teacher, Rumi was an eager student of history, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, Arabic grammar, commentaries on the Quran, and religious law; he attended the most respected colleges, preparing to become “a religious jurist and guider of souls.” As Genghis Khan, and later his grandson, rampaged through the Middle East, Rumi was determined to rise above the “churning realpolitik of the Mongols,” confident that a higher power shaped historical events. His career as a scholar and teacher altered radically when he met Shams of Tabriz, “a singular outlier mystic in a history crowded with extreme religious seekers.” Shams was rude and uncompromising, opposite in personality from the gentle Rumi, but the two formed an intense bond, which Gooch sees as the essential secret of Rumi’s life and work. They withdrew together for many months, inciting jealousy among Rumi’s family. Shams goaded Rumi into sloughing off erudition and looking into his heart, introducing him to music, dance, extreme fasting, and ecstatic whirling. Gooch is generous in portraying 60-year-old Shams’ marriage to Rumi’s teenage stepdaughter as inspired by “late-life blossoming of desire,” despite evidence of the man’s oppressive treatment of his young wife, which ended in her suspicious death. After two and a half years, Shams disappeared, possibly murdered, and Rumi despaired. But his influence lasted for the rest of the poet’s life, emerging in an outpouring of verse, which Gooch explores with passion and insight.
A vivid depiction of the powerful religious forces that Rumi transcended to reveal “the sound of one soul speaking.”Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-199914-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.
As much about Everywoman as one particular woman, French author Ernaux's autobiographical novel laconically describes the cruel realities of old age for a woman once vibrant and independent.
The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides that the only way she can accept her mother's death is to begin "to write about my mother. She is the only woman who really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile dementia for two years...I would also like to capture the real woman, the woman who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.'' And she proceeds to tell the story of this woman—who "preferred giving to everybody rather than taking from them,'' fiercely ambitious and anxious to better herself and her daughter—for whom she worked long hours in the small café and store the family owned. There are the inevitable differences and disputes as the daughter, better educated, rebels against the mother, but the mother makes "the greatest sacrifice of all, which was to part with me.'' The two women never entirely lose contact, however, as the daughter marries, the father dies, and both women move. Proud and self-sufficient, the mother lives alone, but then she has an accident, develops Alzheimer's, and must move to a hospital. A year after her death, the daughter, still mourning, observes, "I shall never hear the sound of her voice again—the last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.'' Never sentimental and always restrained: a deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality.
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.Pub Date: May 12, 1991
ISBN: 0-941423-51-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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