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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
