A vibrant chronicle of a profound spiritual journey.
How Zen led one man to awareness of the miraculous.
When he was 19, traveling in South America, award-winning poet, novelist, and travel writer Shukman (Archangel, 2013, etc.) had an experience so shattering that he could hardly put it into words. “I thought I wanted to go out and see the world,” he reflected soon after. “Instead it was the other way round: the world opened its arms and pulled me in. What did it all mean?” As he recounts in a graceful, insightful, and disarmingly candid memoir, he spent the rest of his life trying to answer that question. The son of academics headed for Cambridge and, he thought, a career in academia himself, Shukman was not given to spiritual or mystical speculation. However, he felt overwhelmed by the “numinous grace” that enveloped him on the beach, a feeling that freed him from his “ordinary self, with its cravings and complaints.” Among those complaints was severe and persistent eczema: “itch and pain in the dermis, frustration and misery in the psyche.” He sought relief from all manner of medical, psychological, and alternative treatments and finally tried meditation: first transcendental meditation and then Zen. At Zen centers, he felt “a sweetness, a sense of justified indolence, of coming closer to life, to a more authentic self.” He went on retreats, emerging with “a sense of having been cleansed, absolved even, and of returning to the world with new eyes.” He studied with several masters, one of whom was a traditional koan teacher. A koan, he learned, is a verbal formulation that the student thinks about while meditating and must give up trying to understand but instead “let it reveal itself” to the heart and deepen one’s understanding of reality. Zen, Shukman writes, teaches not to withdraw but to accept life, pain, suffering, and beauty: “Unless a path leads us back into the world—reincarnates us, as it were—it’s not a complete path.” Shukman now leads his own Zen center in New Mexico.
A vibrant chronicle of a profound spiritual journey.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-262-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
