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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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