Affecting; seasoned with intellectual maturity as well as spiritual passion.
A chronicle of a life spent at the intersections of Eastern and Western thought.
In this spiritual autobiography, first-time memoirist Michaels depicts his rocky but rewarding path toward self-reinvention via Hinduism. Born to a roaming Midwestern family who set their roots down in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Michaels grew up beset by mental and physical illnesses—scoliosis, anxiety—and familial discord. Blamed for his father’s injury, anguish dominated Michaels’ childhood, which then led to an escapist party life in college. Drug-addled and sick, a stay in a psychiatric hospital convinced him of the need to change. Years later, he found himself consulting the man he would affectionately refer to as Babaji, his guru, at a Colorado ashram, determined to put his life on a healthier track. Doing so was hard; he made earnest pilgrimages to various mentors and spiritual communities—including the ashram of Gurumayi in upstate New York—and followed Sri Shambhavananda (his “Babaji”) to the verdant hills of Kailua-Kona in Hawaii. Michaels’ unrushed, often self-deprecating style suits his material. Without melodrama, he catalogs the experiences (he was once accidentally locked inside the chanting hall at an ashram in upstate New York for more than five hours) that led him to alter his fundamental views about the universe. Comparing Hinduism with Western thinking, Michaels parallels the narrative of his spiritual education with the history of his life using the image of a lotus seed as a metaphor for his own development. And surprisingly, despite the seemingly medical character of his recovery, Michaels insists that his return to well-being through spiritual practice was not a psychological process but one “energetic in nature,” a process that aims to reveal the “state of perfection that is latent in everyone.”
Affecting; seasoned with intellectual maturity as well as spiritual passion.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5151-9514-6
Page Count: 232
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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