“Genius or fraud?” American guru Bernard garners an evenhanded new consideration.
Former Rolling Stone managing editor Love delivers a spirited portrayal of the colorful life of early yoga impresario Pierre Bernard (1876–1955).
It wasn’t the Beatles who brought Indian spirituality to America, the author discovered, but a Leon, Iowa, native and autodidact (born Perry Arnold Baker) who established the first yoga centers from San Francisco to New York City. As a teenager, Bernard came under the spell of a Calcutta-born émigré, Sylvais Hamati, a Tantric yogi and itinerant tutor of “Vedic philosophy.” During the course of nearly 20 years, Bernard proved his devoted student of hatha yoga—involving postures, breathing techniques and physical cleansing—as well as Sanskrit, the meditative arts, ethics, philosophy and more. In this straight-laced Victorian era, Bernard’s advocacy of physical yoga—as opposed to the Christianized forms then in vogue, espoused by the Theosophical Society and others—raised hackles, especially since most of Bernard’s students were young women clad in tights. From San Francisco to the Pacific Northwest, his Tantrik Order, featuring blood oaths, secret initiation rituals and cryptic symbols, became wildly successful among the rich and idle, and Bernard eventually relocated to a Manhattan townhouse. Once the vice squad caught wind of the goings-on, Bernard was imprisoned, branded in the newspapers as the Omnipotent Oom and hounded out of town. He and his new partner, dancer Blanche DeVries, relocated to New Jersey, then to a large estate in bucolic Nyack, N.Y. Financed by well-heeled clients such as Margaret Rutherford Mills and the Vanderbilt family, the ashram held circuses, baseball games, classes and functioned as a celebrity rest retreat, until its glory waned after the war. Structured in thematic sections, Love’s work proceeds with a thoroughgoing vitality.
“Genius or fraud?” American guru Bernard garners an evenhanded new consideration.Pub Date: May 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02175-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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