A first-rate account of the colonial officers and scholars, mostly British, who picked through the ruins and lost libraries of India to recover the founding texts and artifacts of Buddhism.
It’s not quite accurate, as the subtitle asserts, to say that Buddhism has ever been a “lost religion” in India; its practitioners there have numbered in the thousands and millions ever since Buddha walked the earth. But, as India-born British historian Allen (Soldier Sahibs, 2001) writes, Buddhism had indeed been largely displaced by Hinduism in the most populous parts of India by the time the British arrived; “the widespread adoption of Hindu tantric practices from Bengal,” he notes, “had fatally weakened the Sangha from within, but the real hammer-blow was the transformation of Brahminism in the eighth and ninth centuries into the Hinduism we see in India today,” caste system and all. It was left to brilliant linguists and archaeologists of the 18th and 19th centuries, among them Sir William Jones, Alexander Cunningham, Colin Mackenzie, and Alexander Csoma de Koros, to reconstruct the origins of the religion some two and a half millennia ago. Working with ancient Pali texts and overgrown ruins, they turned up material evidence of Prince Gautama’s existence and that of his earliest disciples and traced the growth and decline of the religion over the centuries. Some of their findings have been dismissed or revised, as Allen notes, and some of their theses continue to be debated today. Still, he writes, it was largely through their labors that Buddhism was introduced to the West—even though their version of Buddhism tended to be a very Protestant one: a rationalist rendition stripped of its corrupting “Mahayana accretions, rather as the early Christian teaching had been corrupted by Roman Catholicism.”
Well written, well researched: a pleasant excursion in comparative religion and British colonial history.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1197-3
Page Count: 322
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2021 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
