A moving, simple spiritual autobiography.
A monk’s tale of misery leading to freedom.
In straightforward prose, Sheng Yen (Orthodox Chinese Buddhism, 2007, etc.) relates his odyssey from hand-to-mouth childhood in 1930s China to lecturing around the world as a premier Chan (or Zen) Buddhist scholar. Becoming a monk was anything but simple for the author, who lived through a time when Buddhist monasteries in China were frequently destroyed. He weaves his personal story of religious yearning and perseverance into a backdrop of political and social turmoil. He was a 19-year-old monk in training when the communist takeover forced him to flee the idyllic life he’d only begun to cherish. He landed in the nationalist army in Taiwan, an unlikely and ill-fitting job for a man who had pledged to avoid harming sentient beings. Nourished by his early training and the few Buddhist texts he could acquire, Sheng Yen began writing religious essays for an influential, necessarily underground Buddhist periodical called Humanity. He steadily built a reputation under the pen name “World-Awakening General.” After years of postponing his calling because of political circumstances, he finally made it out of the army in 1960 and entered a monastery to study Chan Buddhism under a particularly wily, demanding master. Once he learned to stop questioning the unpredictable and exasperating tasks his master assigned, he began a period of seclusion, finally gaining access to the copious library of Buddhist scholarship for which he had longed. His first-person account of China’s communist revolution focuses on practical details, favoring descriptions of meals, clothing and brief encounters over sweeping theoretical generalizations. Although the account unfolds in a charmingly unsophisticated way, its best audience would be those already knowledgeable about Buddhism and familiar with Sheng Yen’s work, for he spares little time explaining rituals and beliefs.
A moving, simple spiritual autobiography.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-51330-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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
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