An inspiring and necessary addition to the body of work about modern-day Buddhism.
A British journalist’s account of her yearlong investigation into the lives and motivations of women who chose to become Buddhist nuns.
Throughout her more than 20-year career as a foreign correspondent, Toomey had always been drawn to writing about the courage and compassion of the many women she met. In 2011, she decided to focus her attention on women who sought ordination into the male-dominated world of monastic Buddhism. Her project began as a purely “journalistic endeavor.” However, the deaths of her father and mother soon infused the journey with a need for both “a deeper understanding and a wisdom that would heal.” Toomey started in Nepal, “the land where the Buddha was born,” and worked her way east to west through India, Burma, and Japan before heading west to the United States and Europe. The women she met came from a wide array of backgrounds. Some had fled poverty and violence while others, like the Tibetan princess Choying Khandro, had turned their backs on lives of privilege. Still others had left successful careers as policewomen, pilots, actresses, or writers or marriages and families to find the inner peace and fulfillment that had eluded them. Regardless of the particular Buddhist sect they joined, each of Toomey’s interviewees shared a common devotion to Buddhist teachings and to doing good in the world. Many of them also shared a desire to see women become fully integrated members of a religion that, for the most part, still considered them inferior and subservient to male monks. Intelligent and informative, Toomey’s book reveals the hidden lives of women who have been neglected by Buddhist discourse, and it brings to the fore the contributions that more high-profile nuns, such as Pema Chödrön, have made to the resurgent worldwide interest in Buddhist philosophy.
An inspiring and necessary addition to the body of work about modern-day Buddhism.Pub Date: March 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61519-326-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: The Experiment
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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