A warm and disarming new approach to embracing Zen in the real world.
A guide to Buddha and Zen emphasizes accessibility above all.
The latest offering from Neely (Life Between the Tigers, 2013) is as unconventional a Zen Buddhism manual as readers are ever likely to encounter. It’s a koan-heavy collection of lessons, in-jokes, and irreverent asides (“Sacred cows make the best hamburger” appears before the book proper has even started) designed to demystify the history, worldview, and practice of Zen. “There is no plan, no model, no script, no program, no guide, no entry or cheat sheet to reality,” Neely writes, which describes a tumultuous, multifarious world. The Buddhist outlook that he goes on to examine is clearly meant to help smooth that chaos. One key factor that the author discusses is familiar from the countless meditation books currently on the market: stress. Neely uses many different stories to illustrate the harm and futility of anxiety; he mentions, for instance, the perpetual activity of bees. “Do you think they are spending ANY time wondering about what is going to happen next week, what happened last week, or even what is going to happen two seconds from now?” he asks. “No—nor should you.” The method he advocates for undoing this strain is the kind of easy, pointed concentration that will be familiar to devotees of Zen: “Focus is an amazingly powerful tool, yet most of us barely learn to harness it in our lives….Focus can be learned, strengthened, and even taught through mindfulness studies and through meditation.” The net effect of his patient, often humorous simplifications and explanations is to turn a detailed catechism into a smile-inducing devotional. And, as the book’s title suggests, Buddha is at the heart of the transformation. Neely’s Buddha is the kind of Everyperson who can be found not only working at Walmart, but also in every shape and position in life. “He’s…female,” Neely asserts. “Gay. Black. Asian, Caucasian. Named ‘Bubba.’ Drives an eighteen-wheeler. Has gotten a ticket for speeding. Is seven feet tall. Is three years old. Has warts. Eats garlic.” This all-purpose approach serves to bring Buddhism out of its remote temples and plant it squarely in the world most readers know—the grocery store, the highway, and, in a striking example, the movie theater, where the peace of Zen, Neely argues, is available even amid the popcorn and Diet Coke. The author’s reductions of the complexities of Zen Buddhism will no doubt puzzle or irritate many longtime practitioners of the discipline, and some of that exasperation will be justified: occasionally the jokes in these pages seem merely flippant instead of productively irreverent. But the underlying message—that everybody can find enlightenment—shines through and makes the book genuinely intriguing. Ultimately, the author’s many hypotheticals work really well to bring his lessons home to readers.
A warm and disarming new approach to embracing Zen in the real world.Pub Date: March 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9889048-0-4
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Zen Books Worldwide
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sedaris’s sense of life’s absurdity is on full, fine display, as is his emotional body armor. Fortunately, he has plenty of...
Known for his self-deprecating wit and the harmlessly eccentric antics of his family, Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day, 2000, etc.) can also pinch until it hurts in this collection of autobiographical vignettes.
Once again we are treated to the author’s gift for deadpan humor, especially when poking fun at his family and neighbors. He draws some of the material from his youth, like the portrait of the folks across the street who didn’t own a TV (“What must it be like to be so ignorant and alone?” he wonders) and went trick-or-treating on November first. Or the story of the time his mother, after a fifth snow day in a row, chucked all the Sedaris kids out the door and locked it. To get back in, the older kids devised a plan wherein the youngest, affection-hungry Tiffany, would be hit by a car: “Her eagerness to please is absolute and naked. When we ask her to lie in the middle of the street, her only question was ‘Where?’ ” Some of the tales cover more recent incidents, such as his sister’s retrieval of a turkey from a garbage can; when Sedaris beards her about it, she responds, “Listen to you. If it didn’t come from Balducci’s, if it wasn’t raised on polenta and wild baby acorns, it has to be dangerous.” But family members’ square-peggedness is more than a little pathetic, and the fact that they are fodder for his stories doesn’t sit easy with Sedaris. He’ll quip, “Your life, your privacy, your occasional sorrow—it’s not like you're going to do anything with it,” as guilt pokes its nose around the corner of the page. Then he’ll hitch himself up and lacerate them once again, but not without affection even when the sting is strongest. Besides, his favorite target is himself: his obsessive-compulsiveness and his own membership in this company of oddfellows.
Sedaris’s sense of life’s absurdity is on full, fine display, as is his emotional body armor. Fortunately, he has plenty of both.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-14346-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
Possibly inspired by the letters Cleary has received as a children's author, this begins with second-grader Leigh Botts' misspelled fan letter to Mr. Henshaw, whose fictitious book itself derives from the old take-off title Forty Ways W. Amuse a Dog. Soon Leigh is in sixth grade and bombarding his still-favorite author with a list of questions to be answered and returned by "next Friday," the day his author report is due. Leigh is disgruntled when Mr. Henshaw's answer comes late, and accompanied by a set of questions for Leigh to answer. He threatens not to, but as "Mom keeps nagging me about your dumb old questions" he finally gets the job done—and through his answers Mr. Henshaw and readers learn that Leigh considers himself "the mediumest boy in school," that his parents have split up, and that he dreams of his truck-driver dad driving him to school "hauling a forty-foot reefer, which would make his outfit add up to eighteen wheels altogether. . . . I guess I wouldn't seem so medium then." Soon Mr. Henshaw recommends keeping a diary (at least partly to get Leigh off his own back) and so the real letters to Mr. Henshaw taper off, with "pretend," unmailed letters (the diary) taking over. . . until Leigh can write "I don't have to pretend to write to Mr. Henshaw anymore. I have learned to say what I think on a piece of paper." Meanwhile Mr. Henshaw offers writing tips, and Leigh, struggling with a story for a school contest, concludes "I think you're right. Maybe I am not ready to write a story." Instead he writes a "true story" about a truck haul with his father in Leigh's real past, and this wins praise from "a real live author" Leigh meets through the school program. Mr. Henshaw has also advised that "a character in a story should solve a problem or change in some way," a standard juvenile-fiction dictum which Cleary herself applies modestly by having Leigh solve his disappearing lunch problem with a burglar-alarmed lunch box—and, more seriously, come to recognize and accept that his father can't be counted on. All of this, in Leigh's simple words, is capably and unobtrusively structured as well as valid and realistic. From the writing tips to the divorced-kid blues, however, it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that made the Ramona books so rewarding.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1983
ISBN: 143511096X
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
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