Shepherd’s experience with Zen is not everyone’s, but it should prove helpful to those struggling with spiritual practice.
A memoir of Zen study in the 1970s.
There are many books showing how the Zen experience translates into the West, but this debut book by Shepherd (Music/Kauai Community Coll.) is as much about falling away from the path as following it. When he came to meditation during the latter stages of the hippie era, it was during a time of drugs, hedonism and excess. A long-distance runner with a more ascetic older brother (who adhered to the path and has become a Zen monk), the author came to his practice with a combination of innocence, idealism and competitiveness. “I would be a Zen Man extraordinaire, of this I was certain,” he writes of a path that would take him from his native New Jersey to a meditation community in Hawaii and a more dedicated, disciplined commitment in Japan. When he arrived there, he thought of the "Eightfold Path as Easy Street or the Yellow Brick Road. It would take several more years, but I would gradually go from wide-eyed naivete to gimlet-eyed disenchantment. For now, though, I was drowning in milk and honey.” The milk curdled as he grew increasingly resentful of being considered a “foreign weirdo” by so many Japanese, who felt that Zen was their birthright and that for an American to practice was like “a dog trying to master verb conjugations.” Shepherd also discovered that as the meditation practice might help him dissolve the ego, it was leaving him with nightmares and neuroses. Ultimately, he took a different path as a music professor, where meditation has continued to enrich his life.
Shepherd’s experience with Zen is not everyone’s, but it should prove helpful to those struggling with spiritual practice.Pub Date: April 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61172-011-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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