A richly presented, if didactic, survey of Buddhist thought.
An illustrated treatise on Tibetan religious art that explores visual motifs—animals, flowers, geometric symbols, and much else—that convey precepts of Buddhist philosophy.
Huber and Glantz (The Golden Valley, 2016) spotlight artworks from the Senge Buddhist monasteries in Tibet’s Golden Valley, found on furniture, altar pieces, scripture boxes, prayer wheels, and other objects produced over the last 600 years. They present more than 625 images of these pieces, which feature intricate compositions of flowing lines and vibrant hues of red, blue, pink, green and orange. (Huber notes that he finds the paintings so bizarre and psychedelic that he fleetingly wonders, “could the artists be on drugs, possibly LSD?”) The book is therefore a visual feast, and the authors focus on interpreting this imagery in light of Buddhist precepts. They arrange the text with alphabetic entries on specific visual tropes, which include information on aesthetics, folkloric associations, and mystic, philosophical allusions. Thus, the entry on bael notes the real-world fruit’s aromatic pulp and effectiveness at relieving diarrhea, as well as its reputed ability to boost positive karma to bring one closer to ending samsara, the cycle of suffering and reincarnation; its use in fertility rituals; its canonical artistic representation in groups of three representing “the three jewels of Buddhism”; and its symbolization of “the goal of recognizing emptiness and dependency and the connection between cause and effect.” Throughout, the authors’ investigation of symbols ranges from the mundane to the fanciful. Fish images imply happiness, they note, as well as fertility and the inexhaustible abundance of the Buddha’s energy. The lotus flower speaks of “the soul’s path from the mud of materialism to the purity of enlightenment.” A picture of a skull made into a cup filled with boiling human fat is no mere provocation, but symbolizes “the empowerment of the absolute truth of no self and the realization of the ‘illusory body’.” Their extensive discussions of these subjects effectively make the text a sort of primer on Buddhist doctrine, with substantial sections on the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Noble Path, and the Five Precepts. The authors recount vignettes from the Buddha’s life and parables, such as a tale of a tortoise that refused to leave his pond when it dried up (teaching the folly of attachment to worldly things). They reprint a lengthy Buddhist hymn and sprinkle representative mantras throughout. Overall, though, this book isn’t the most imaginative introduction to Buddhism’s esoteric precepts, due in part to the authors’ dry, catechistic tone, and they’re also rather vague about the “applications” of the lore they present, despite mentioning them in the book’s subtitle. Still, many people will discover uses for this book; novice meditators, for example, will find ideas to ponder and phrases to chant; designers of prayer flags (as well as death-metal band posters) will find resonant imagery; and general readers with an interest in Buddhism and art will find encyclopedic information on a significant tradition with much aesthetic appeal.
A richly presented, if didactic, survey of Buddhist thought.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73146-934-2
Page Count: 107
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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