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
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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