An insightful, detailed look at kirtan chanting and Bhakti yoga.
A Canadian Bhakti yoga teacher and founder of a Nova Scotia yoga retreat offers an in-depth debut guide to the Indian chanting practice of kirtan.
In the mid-1970s, the 28-year-old author experienced a spontaneous spiritual awakening that inspired her lifelong pursuit of yogic chanting. Her book explains how to chant Hindu names and mantras and how to set up a kirtan chanting group with a leader and musicians. Prabha intersperses insights she’s gained from a lifetime of practice with personal anecdotes illustrating particular points. For example, she emphasizes in great detail the seemingly exceptional benefits of chanting: “If anger or worry overwhelms you,” she writes, “wield the great sword of chanting and swiftly annihilate it.” During kirtan chanting, she says, some devotees reach soaring heights of trance-induced ecstasy. She tells of one occasion when she chanted with one of her teachers, Swami Gyanananda, and she started dancing complex Indian dance moves that she could have only known through years of study, including intricate figures that experienced Bharata Natyam dancers recognized. In mostly clear and engaging prose, she reveals many of the philosophical underpinnings of Bhakti yoga and offers an interesting, detailed exploration of the relationship between Sanskrit sacred chants and various aspects of “the divine.” Overall, this book offers a thorough introduction to its subject. For example, it delves into Hindu sacred texts to talk about Hindu deities, their attributes, and stories that reveal their characters, their significance, and how, through chanting, devotees can realize the divine in themselves. The author also stresses the importance of correct Sanskrit pronunciation, including a pronunciation guide and glossary.
An insightful, detailed look at kirtan chanting and Bhakti yoga.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9939498-1-4
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Shining Bay Books
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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