Ram Dass lived a full life and then some. His final statement is thorough and, yes, enlightening.
A comprehensive memoir from a famous but humble spiritual seeker.
Mention the name Ram Dass (1931-2019), and you’re likely to hear three words: Be Here Now. However, there’s much more to the man born Richard Alpert than his best-known book, as this posthumous memoir, co-written with Das, makes amply clear. Born just outside of Boston to an ambitious Jewish family, he quickly became a hungry spiritual seeker. He ran with fellow Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary, and together they became pioneers in hallucinogenic research. As he explains, psilocybin and LSD, which were legal when he began his studies, were a means of exploring other planes of consciousness, a rationale that didn’t keep him from getting fired for turning on an undergraduate student. One can imagine such a book by another author—say, Leary—as full of chest-puffing and war stories. Thankfully, on his road to enlightenment, Ram Dass also accumulated a good deal of humility. This comes across clearest in the sections that find him in India, where he became a disciple of the Hindu guru Maharaj-ji, who taught the young American pilgrim how to love and worship without using drugs—and gave him his new name, which means “servant of God.” “Turning toward Eastern spirituality was not just my inner evolution but part of a major cultural shift,” writes the author, who proves to be a steady guide to some heady events and trends, including the Harvard psychedelic tests, the communal living experiment in Millbrook, New York, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, and the influx of Westerners flooding India in search of a higher state of being. Familiar names walk in, walk out, and often return: Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and the members of the Grateful Dead.
Ram Dass lived a full life and then some. His final statement is thorough and, yes, enlightening.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68364-628-0
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Sounds True
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
An inspiring memoir that will thrill soccer fans as well as social justice activists.
The soccer superstar discusses her life on and off the field and how she has used celebrity in the service of social justice.
Rapinoe grew up in “an athletic family” in small-town Northern California. Early in childhood, she and her identical twin, Rachael, revealed exceptional physical gifts. Both began playing soccer on a boys team at age 6 and quickly overshadowed peers with their "instinctive hand-eye coordination and physical fearlessness.” Later, they played on an all-female team their father created until both were selected to join a bigger, more competitive one in Sacramento. As their soccer skills developed, the sisters discovered a passion for justice of all kinds. “My sister and I have this in common: nothing riles us up more than bullying, cheating, unfairness,” writes the author. Eventually, this passion for social justice became the cornerstone of Rapinoe's stances on such issues as LGBTQ+ rights, pay equity in sports, and the Black Lives Matter movement. When the author reached college in 2004, she surpassed Rachael as an athlete and received an invitation to play in the FIFA Under-19 Women's World Championship in Thailand. In 2006, she joined the U.S. national team as the "youngest and least experienced player.” A major knee injury put her out of contention for the 2008 Olympic team but also taught her the meaning of patience and humility. After college, she turned professional and, in 2012, publicly came out as a lesbian. After a World Cup victory in 2015, Rapinoe became a vocal advocate for pay increases for female athletes, and in 2016, she took a knee to protest racial injustice. This candid memoir about an outspoken White athlete who has consciously "extend[ed] [her] privilege" to those marginalized people both in and out of the sporting world is sure to engage general audiences and soccer fans alike.
An inspiring memoir that will thrill soccer fans as well as social justice activists.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984881-16-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A valuable contribution to our understanding of one of history’s most vital figures.
An epistolary memoir of Nelson Mandela’s prison years.
From August 1962 to February 1990, Mandela (1918-2013) was imprisoned by the apartheid state of South Africa. During his more than 27 years in prison, the bulk of which he served on the notorious Robben Island prison off the shores of Cape Town, he wrote thousands of letters to family and friends, lawyers and fellow African National Congress members, prison officials, and members of the government. Heavily censored for both content and length, letters from Robben Island and South Africa’s other political prisons did not always reach their intended targets; when they did, the censorship could make them virtually unintelligible. To assemble this vitally important collection, Venter (A Free Mind: Ahmed Kathrada's Notebook from Robben Island, 2006, etc.), a longtime Johannesburg-based editor and journalist, pored through these letters in various public and private archives across South Africa and beyond as well as Mandela’s own notebooks, in which he transcribed versions of these letters. The result is a necessary, intimate portrait of the great leader. The man who emerges is warm and intelligent and a savvy, persuasive, and strategic thinker. During his life, Mandela was a loving husband and father, a devotee of the ANC’s struggle, and capable of interacting with prominent statesmen and the ANC’s rank and file. He was not above flattery or hard-nosed steeliness toward his captors as suited his needs, and he was always yearning for freedom, not only—or even primarily—for himself, but rather for his people, a goal that is the constant theme of this collection and was the consuming vision of his entire time as a prisoner. Venter adds tremendous value with his annotations and introductions to the work as a whole and to the book’s various sections.
A valuable contribution to our understanding of one of history’s most vital figures.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63149-117-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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