A cleareyed critique that generously accounts for humanity’s “profoundly sincere and motivated” quest for happiness and...
Searching for bliss in America’s heartland.
In her candid debut memoir, journalist Hoffman, a former staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times, recalls her childhood in Fairfield, Iowa, in the 1980s and ’90s, on a 272-acre campus established by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to promote Transcendental Meditation, spiritual enlightenment, and world peace. “The Movement I had grown up in,” writes the author, “call it a cult, a religion, a community, it was all these—had rescued my family from a scary time.” Her alcoholic father had abandoned his family; her mother, left with Claire and her brother, was destitute. Swept up in the TM movement, which was notorious for its celebrity followers (the Beatles, Mia Farrow), Hoffman’s mother saw in Iowa the promise of utopia. “We are talking of a new civilization,” Maharishi claimed. “No one will remain stressed, no one will remain hectic, everyone will fulfill one’s wants.” At first, Hoffman went to the local public school because her mother could not afford the pricey Maharishi School, but when an anonymous donor paid her tuition, she joined the school, where the curriculum focused on bliss. “Everyone wanted to be experiencing and emanating bliss”; everyone followed the Maharishi’s directions to become enlightened, which meant meditating twice a day and following his dictates for “the way you ate, slept, built your home, wore your jewels, and looked to the stars.” As she grew up, Hoffman became increasingly suspicious of the Maharishi’s grand plan. First, she noticed “a tangible shift…from mantras to products” that the Maharishi trademarked. Maintaining that “Americans only value things if they have to pay for them,” he increased the school’s tuition and charged thousands of dollars for his coveted Flying Course in levitation. The author was also suspicious about his claim that the fall of the Berlin Wall had resulted from the power of meditation.
A cleareyed critique that generously accounts for humanity’s “profoundly sincere and motivated” quest for happiness and peace.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-233884-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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