An intriguing but familiar series of “channeled” meditations on the true nature of reality.
In this debut spiritual book, a seeker gains wisdom from a celestial Lion during a vision quest.
“Are you ready to carry my legacy?” asks a magnificent, larger-than-life Lion to the narrator of Shankari’s work, a book she refers to as “channeled” through her by the universe itself rather than actually written by the author. (It will be the judgment call of each reader as to how to categorize the volume.) In the fervid dream world that carries the narrative forward, the story begins with a man appearing to Shankari from a pure, primeval state in which humans live in complete harmony with the natural world. The man introduces Shankari to the Lion, who unfolds an entire worldview to the author in a series of discussions about life, faith, happiness, and a half-dozen other broad philosophical subjects that tend to crop up in spiritual/New Age texts of this kind. While Shankari is guided throughout by her own “wisdom,” which “constantly whispers my truth,” she receives from the Lion many lessons about the true nature of reality, realizing that the majestic being “was here to teach me to create a different reality than the one I was taught, than the one that was dictated to me.” The Lion’s teachings about this new reality will be very familiar to readers of modern spiritual works. “To understand the truth, one must be still,” the Lion tells the author at one point. “It is from stillness that answers and wisdom arise.” Also: “Life is an illusion.” In chapters smoothly interspersed with these and other earnest revelations, Shankari addresses readers directly, sometimes challenging their complacency (“Admit it, you don’t know what it is to live a life in truth”) and sometimes speaking in the kind of apothegms that fill the rest of this placid series opener: “If you cry that you have not felt love, consider that you have not allowed yourself to love yourself.” The Lion’s captivating thoughts about the true nature of existence will appeal to fans of books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as will the story of a state of prelapsarian balance with nature.
An intriguing but familiar series of “channeled” meditations on the true nature of reality.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-950282-41-8
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Bublish, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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