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
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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