BUDDHA

Name: BUDDHA
Author: Karen Armstrong
ISBN: 0-670-89193-2

by Karen Armstrong ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 19, 2001

Those who wish to acquaint themselves with how Buddhism came to be, and with the individual who created it, will find this...

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An excellent primer on the Buddha’s life and teachings.

Departing from her usual Judeo-Christian stomping grounds (The Battle for God, 2000, etc.) to pen a biography of Siddhatha Gotama (circa 563-483 b.c.), Armstrong admits up front that she has set herself no easy task. The little information available about his life simply will not “satisfy the criteria of modern scientific history.” In addition, Gotama himself would likely reject an effort to chronicle his doings, as “throughout his life he fought against the cult of personality and endlessly deflected the attention of his disciples from himself.” In response to these difficulties, Armstrong has produced not so much a rendering of the few extant details of Gotama’s quotidian life, but an account of how his circumstances led him to develop one of the great religions. She makes vivid the vanished world of the turbulent Ganges basin from outlines provided by the earliest texts available, those written in the North Indian dialect of Pali and preserved by Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand. Beginning with Gotama’s rejection of his family to join one of the many bands of mendicant monks in search of a higher truth, Armstrong creates a profile of an intensely practical man. When he cannot reach Nirvana using any other teacher’s practice, Gotama makes up his own, rejecting “abstruse theories about the creation of the universe or the existence of a Supreme Being” in favor of a series of practices to be strictly followed. The resultant religion was based entirely on actions and was open to all, something truly revolutionary in a land whose culture was based on an unshakable caste system. Armstrong details these practices and theories and also provides an invaluable glossary.

Those who wish to acquaint themselves with how Buddhism came to be, and with the individual who created it, will find this an essential text.

Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2001

ISBN: 0-670-89193-2

Page Count: 205

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

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by Karen Armstrong

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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FILLED WITH FIRE AND LIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

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NIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)