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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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