For fellow seekers, Buddha-nature on a surfboard.
Eastern mysticism and Western rites of passage inform this second volume of memoir from the San Francisco–based journalist.
In his latest, Yogis (The Fear Project: What Our Most Primal Emotion Taught Me About Survival, Success, Surfing…and Love, 2013, etc.) picks up where Saltwater Buddha (2009) left off. Toward the end, he writes, “somewhere along the line I realized that this book was Sonam’s book—a homage to my old best friend and teacher.” He had met the man who would become something of a spiritual mentor when he was in his early 20s, on a trip to India, trying to find himself and recover from the sort of heartbreak common to a young man who is torn between commitment to another and discovering his own true path. A Tibetan in exile, Sonam not only put his young friend’s problems in perspective; he imbued him with a new attitude. Yogis and Sonam spent a lot of time singing John Denver’s “Country Roads,” adapting the verses to their own situation, and Sonam greets the day by saying, “Dis morning, I bery happy,” and ends the day with, “Dis night, I bery happy.” The book does more than reduce the wisdom of the East to “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” but its glibness occasionally veers toward spiritual parody. When the author reunites with the girl who had broken his heart, he realized, “Sati could not glue me back together again. We were two ripples on the sea that had drifted together and crossed through each other. Exchanged molecules and skin and ideas. In a way we’d always be together. But the winds had sent us in other directions now.” So Yogis went back to school to study journalism, to learn a trade as well as Eastern religions, and to the beach to surf and reflect on the notion that “God is the sea”—and eventually to a wife and children, otherwise barely mentioned until the end.
For fellow seekers, Buddha-nature on a surfboard.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-240517-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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