Fascinating reading about an intriguing woman.
Investigative journalist Goldberg (The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, 2009, etc.) fluidly explores the extraordinary life of Indra Devi (1899-2002), the woman who helped transform the ancient Indian discipline of yoga into a worldwide phenomenon.
Born Eugenia Peterson to a noble family in Riga, Latvia, Devi’s early life was marked by instability and separations from family members. Her father vanished after divorcing Devi’s mother, who pursued a peripatetic life as an actress. After graduating from school in 1916, Devi followed her mother from Moscow to Berlin, where both immersed themselves in cabaret culture. In 1926, Devi had a life-changing encounter with Jiddu Krishnamurti, who introduced her to the Indian-inflected spirituality known as theosophy. She traveled to India, a place that so beguiled her with its “constant sense of transcendence” that she found she could no longer live comfortably in the West. She returned to India, where she continued her involvement in esoteric spirituality and began serious study of yoga, then an all-male practice. Yet she was able to charm some of the discipline’s leading exponents, including Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, into teaching her. Just before the outbreak of World War II, she moved to Shanghai with her diplomat husband, where she began teaching yoga and going by the name Indira (later changed to Indra) Devi. By 1947, she had found her way to California. There, she gravitated into the orbit of cultural luminary Aldous Huxley, taught yoga in Hollywood, and, after a divorce, married a homeopathic physician named Siegfried Knauer. Devi opened a yoga school in Mexico and became close to the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba. Eventually, she moved to Buenos Aires, where she continued her work as a yoga teacher and lecturer. Goldberg’s book, which uses material she uncovered about Devi on four continents, is not only thoroughly researched; it also offers insights into a magnificently elusive figure, the culture she loved, and the yogic practice she bequeathed to the West.
Fascinating reading about an intriguing woman.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-59351-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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