by Nikolai Grozni ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2008
Zen and the art of writing a pretty cool book.
Join a spiritual seeker on his journey to becoming a monk.
A promising jazz pianist, Bulgarian native Grozni came to the United States to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Soon fed up with the course his life had taken (“I’m angry at the world!” he yells at one point. “And I’m getting out.”), he moved to the Himalayas to study Buddhism. Aided every step of the way by a tiny Tibetan nun named Ani Dawa, Grozni assimilated into life at the monastery, but he possessed a rebellious streak that often made it difficult for him to become at one with himself. Eventually he came to the realization that a life in which you’re expected to quietly contemplate all the time wasn’t for him, so—spoiler alert—he shed his robes and fulfilled a teacher’s prophecies that one day he would disrobe, fall in love and write silly books. Well, the teacher was almost on target: This book isn’t the least bit silly. Much of the narrative is a trifle mundane, but that’s to be expected—to a Westerner the daily life of a monk is in many ways as mundane as it gets. But readers who take a Zen approach to the text will probably get sucked into monastic simplicity and Buddhist philosophy. And things definitely liven up whenever Grozni’s charismatic, profane, cigarette-sucking pal Tsar comes on the scene. The hyper, loopy yin to Grozni’s mellow (or at least attempting to be mellow) yang, Tsar helps turn what could have been a staid memoir into something original and special.
Zen and the art of writing a pretty cool book.Pub Date: May 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59448-984-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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