A spiritual memoir with plenty of food for thought.
The director of the Ethics Initiative at the MIT Media Lab tells the compelling story of how he evolved away from his Hindu Brahmin background to become a Buddhist monk.
Priyadarshi was 10 years old when he first received the call to abandon “the comfort zone of the familiar, with its false sense of certainty and complacent promises.” After awakening from a recurring dream of a Japanese Buddhist monk, he left his school dormitory in Kolkata and traveled to a Buddhist temple several hours away in Rajgir. There, he found a photograph of the man he had seen in his dreams and met a monk named Nabatame who told Priyadarshi that he had been “expect[ed].” By the time his uncle found him, Priyadarshi knew that his mission was to follow the teachings of the Buddha. Forced to return home, he fought to carry on with a plan that went against what was expected of him as the member of a Brahmin family. He reached an uneasy truce with his parents only after he promised to continue his schooling by day and attend prayer sessions at the local Buddhist temple before dawn and at night. In the years that followed, he traveled to other Buddhist temples in India and Nepal. Later, he failed his university entrance exams so that he could become a fully ordained monk. His family then sent him to live with an uncle in New York, where he attended college and studied world religions. A scholarship to study abroad for a year returned him to India, where he continued the monastic education that would culminate in ordination. Later, the author attended Harvard Divinity School and became a visiting scholar at MIT, where he began an interdisciplinary dialogue about ethics that evolved into the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values. In this wise and searching journey Priyadarshi fearlessly engages with the mystery of life and explores the visible and invisible connections that comprise our “vast web” of being.
A spiritual memoir with plenty of food for thought.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984819-85-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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