Thorough, if dry, recollections from a guru’s follower.
A debut philosophical memoir describes the life of a spiritual thinker’s devotee.
A child of sunny Santa Barbara, California, in the 1950s, Lee began to ask the big questions early on: “What had stirred in me was an awareness that there is a very great and unexplainable and forceful otherworld presence in life that is ever present, just here—close and intimate—but seldom manifest.” Disenchanted by the limitations of Christianity from an early age, he discovered meditation on his own, though he had no word for it. Introduced to the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti by a friend, Lee had the opportunity to meet the guru at a talk in Switzerland in 1965 and quickly became one of his most devoted followers. Lee recalls: “When Krishnamurti entered the tent and took his place on the platform…I thought he was the most elegant and intelligent person I had ever seen.” Over the next half-century, Lee served as a teacher, administrator, and trustee in various schools and foundations dedicated to the teachings of Krishnamurti, a celebrated speaker and author—born in India—who hoped to reform society through a revolution in human consciousness. With this book, Lee recounts the lessons he learned as an associate of the thinker as well as his encounters with other luminaries of the time, including Indira Gandhi and the Dalai Lama. Lee, a serviceable writer, records his memories in clear prose that makes even the more abstract philosophical notions comprehensible. For those seriously interested in the life and teachings of Krishnamurti, the book represents a valuable resource regarding the inner workings of his movement. Even so, it is an arid read. Lee does not have much critical to say of his mentor, and there is little in the way of dynamism or a narrative arc. For all the discussion of the man’s teachings (along with some of Lee’s extrapolations), those unfamiliar with Krishnamurti are unlikely to become adherents. Readers with any passing familiarity with New Age movements will likely be left wondering just what all the fuss was about.
Thorough, if dry, recollections from a guru’s follower.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5043-6504-8
Page Count: 306
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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