A live-wire account of Franklin's 13 years as a disciple of the notorious collector of Rolls-Royces and hungry souls. This isn't the first report on Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and how his spiritual movement degenerated into a paramilitary farce, but it's the most balanced yet personally intense to date, avoiding the finger-pointing of Kate Strelley's The Ultimate Game (1987) and Hugh Milne's Bhagwan (1986). Some of the force of Franklin's memoir arises from her veteran writing skills—she ghostwrote Rajneesh's first two books—and the rest from her willingness to bare her innermost psychic currents and not turn her back on a decade's worth of spiritual ecstasies. (Upon her first meeting Rajneesh, ``he patted me gently on the head and the whole world disappeared''; months later, during a ritual celebration, ``carried along by the pulsating rhythm of the music and the energy of Bhagwan's presence, the top of my head suddenly exploded with the most powerful orgasm I'd ever experienced''). Yet without denying Rajneesh's apparently very real ability to transform the psychic states of tens of thousands, Franklin owns up to the terrible price paid by those who bought the ``dreams'' of this ``spiritual Master.'' She herself, to her deep regret, abandoned three children in order to move from suburban N.Y.C. to India and then to Oregon to be with Rajneesh, and—as chronicled in a freshly shocking recap of the well-known rise to power of Rajneesh's hit-woman Sheela, with unprecedented details of mass poisonings and drug-dealing added—the movement as a whole confused spiritual guidance with slavery, selling its soul in the bargain. Franklin ``still [doesn't] know if Bhagwan Rajneesh [who died in 1990] was a madman or a messiah, a charlatan or a saint''—and by courageously confessing both the good and the evil he spawned, she's written a compelling memoir that's also a notable cautionary document of spiritual search.
Pub Date: April 25, 1992
ISBN: 0-88268-139-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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