Category: religion
- Stands with the BestMind Sky: Zen Teaching on Living and Dying by Jakusho Kwong. Wisdom Publications. 178 pp. $18.95. ***** I have a bias that a dharma teacher’s first book is usually the best one. With most teachers, they finally get it together to put out a book (or somebody does it for them), and it’s not anything they ...Read more
- More Than PostureThe Posture of Meditation: A Practical Manual for Meditators of All Traditions. Second Edition By Will Johnson. Shambhala. 161 pp. $15.95. ***** It’s hard to believe that any activity as fundamentally simple as zazen—all you do is sit there and breathe—could become complicated, but the human mind (my human mind, anyway) can complicate anything. Though I’ve ...Read more
- Where Zen BeganChina Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen by David Hinton. Shambhala. 176 pp. $17.95. ***** This is a fascinating and important book. David Hinton is a long time—thirty-five years—translator of Chinese poetry and other texts. He has translated most of the great Chinese classics, including the Tao Te Ching, I Ching, Chuang Tzu, The Analects, Mencius, ...Read more
- Fable Attraction(The Faulkner Project) A Fable by William Faulkner. Faulkner Novels 1942-1954 Library of America pp. 665-1072. *** A Fable is an odd book in the Faulkner universe. It’s the longest of his novels; it’s always sat there on the shelf looking imposing beside such shorter masterpieces as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. ...Read more
- It’s an Art (Says the Old Fart)The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works by Shinzen Young. Sounds True. 265 pp. $13.89. ***** As Shinzen Young himself says in one of the later chapters, Zen teachers are known for under-explaining meditation, vipassana teachers for over-explaining. It’s as if vipassana teachers want to tell you everything that might possibly happen, so you never have ...Read more
- The Wild Man and the SchoolmarmAppreciate Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice by Taizan Maezumi Roshi. Shambhala. 160pp. $19.59. ***** Ordinary Wonder: Zen Life and Practice by Charlotte Joko Beck. Shambhala. 240 pp. $17.95. ***** Dharma books wander into my life at exactly the right moment. Years ago, I picked up Taizan Maezumi’s Appreciate Your Life and, except for the title ...Read more
- I Bow BackWhen You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen by Norman Fischer. Shambhala. 336 pp. $16.97. ***** I haven’t read all his books, but for my money this is Norman Fischer’s best, reflections on a wide range of topics from a man who has spent fifty years living and teaching the ...Read more
- Give Us a GrinThe Guide by R. K. Narayan. Penguin Classics 196pp. $16.00. **** If you have some time on your hands these days—maybe you’re recently retired, or lost your job during the pandemic—have you thought of becoming a teacher of Advaita Vedanta, or Kashmir Shavism? I realize you’re supposed to be enlightened to do that, but is that ...Read more
- MeantownMare of Easttown a TV Mini Series by Craig Zobel. Written by Brad Ingelsby. With Kate Winslett, Julianne Nicholson, Jean Smart, Guy Pearce. HBO. ****1/2 As a person who grew up in Pennsylvania, I know there is an element of crabby, pessimistic, life-denying people who live there, especially in the smaller industrial communities. There’s also another ...Read more
- Name Droppers ExtraordinaireInside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis. Knopf. 545 pp. $28.82 Country Girl: A Memoir by Edna O’Brien. Little, Brown. 368 pp. $27.94. Inside Story is a novel because Martin Amis chooses to call it one. It has novelistic sections, but the bulk of the book is a memoir of some writers who have been his good ...Read more
- There’s Not Enough!It’s a State of Mind How’s your supply of toilet paper these days? I always found it weird that, when faced with a mysterious pandemic of epic proportions, the first thing most Americans thought of was wiping their butts. Maybe they were just buying paper towels to wipe down surfaces (which we recently discovered, after doing ...Read more
- Not a Matter of BeliefConfessions of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Bachelor. Random House. 320 pp. $14.99 Some years ago, when I was trying to get my head around Christianity, I read various works by C.S. Lewis, including Mere Christianity. Lewis is widely regarded as an effective proselytizer for the religion, offering not a passionate but a reasonable approach to ...Read more
- Portrait of the Artists Through a Boozy HazeEarly Novels and Stories by James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country. Library of America. 970 pp. In the midst of the endless current theorizing about race and sexuality and gender identity, and talk of all the books we must read (I hate to be told I must read a book), ...Read more
- I Like IkeThe Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer Volume II: A Friend of Kafka to Passions. Library of America. 856 pp. ***** Back in the days when Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories appeared in the New Yorker, I never missed one. It was a thrill to read the work of a man who wrote so vividly, who seemed ...Read more
- That’s Not the ChoiceReflections on The Friend In Sigrid Nunez’ superb novel The Friend, the narrator is thinking back on a friend who has just died, and mentions that he was a committed atheist. “Between religion and knowledge, he said, a person must choose knowledge.” I almost jumped out of my chair as I read that. That’s not the ...Read more
- What Is Liberation?Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment by John Giono. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 368 pp. $25.49. **** For the two years I lived in Cambridge—1991-93, while my wife was in Divinity School—I was in bookstore heaven. It seems strange to say nowadays, when bookstores barely exist. There was the Harvard ...Read more
- How He Thought of MeMy First Shrink Every time I ever went to a therapist, I went because I was in physical pain. The first time, because the whole idea was so foreign to me, it took me months to finally pull the trigger. I also felt reluctant because I was afraid of what he’d say. I was afraid he’d ...Read more
- Jane Austen He’s NotPierre, or The Ambiguities by Herman Melville. Library of America pp.1-421. **1/2 It’s a bad sign when you finish the book and breathe a huge sigh of relief. I have enormous admiration for Herman Melville. Of all the 19th century American novelists, his career has the largest span. He began with popular books like Typee and Omoo, ...Read more
- What Healing IsFor My 72nd Birthday The morning my father died we had barely gotten back from the hospital when there was a knock at the door and my mother opened it to Mrs. Shriver, a neighbor from across the street. She was an older woman, with a ruddy, deeply lined face, kept herself busy with outdoor sports, ...Read more
- They Can’t Get StartedShtisel a Netflix series (2 seasons of 12 episodes) by Along Zingman. With Doval’e Glickman, Michael Alom, Neta Riskin, Shira Haas, Zohar Shtrauss. ***** Like everyone else during the pandemic, my wife and I have been searching for streaming series that hold our attention. We’ve been through any number of suggestions—some of which seemed rather desperate—with ...Read more
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You Need to be WritingThe Other SideThe River is Freedom, the Raft ParadiseThe Nothing of GodWe Are Stardust We Are Golden
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (114)American literature (197)art (109)Buddhism (163)Christianity (119)creative process (232)death and dying (128)meditation (118)movies (152)music (36)race (95)religion (180)sex (157)spirituality (167)the art of narrative (238)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)