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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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