Books In Brief

By Andrea McQuillin


TEMPTATIONS OF THE WEST
How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond
By Pankaj Mishra
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006; 323 pp.; $25 (cloth)

If you haven’t discovered him yet, Pankaj Mishra is a young writer and critic to watch. His first nonfiction book, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, was an extended personal essay on the Buddha’s legacy to and relevance in the modern world. This collection of eight travelogues, broadly dealing with the clash of new and old in fractious South and Central Asia, will contribute to his growing reputation as a writer and observer. Mishra, who was born in India, is well-traveled and well-read. In Temptations of the West he brings places and people to life with vivid descriptions of the particular, set against a backdrop of culture and history. Sadly, what he most often observes is conflict and tension—between Hindus and Muslims, between religion and capitalism, between the haves and the have-nots. Mishra doesn’t offer any solutions to complex problems in societies remote to many of us, but he brings humility and insight to bear in describing them.

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PRACTICING PEACE IN TIMES OF WAR
By Pema Chödrön
Shambhala Publications, 2006; 128 pp.; $15.95 (cloth)

Since the best-selling Start Where You Are, readers have eagerly awaited each installment of Pema Chödrön’s kitchen-sink explication of the Buddhist teachings. This gift-size book is a short elaboration on a subject that Chödrön returns to time and again without being tiring—working with emotions during difficult circumstances. The idea that global peace can only be created by people working with their own minds is reasonable enough, but actually doing it is another thing. Chödrön is an expert on the moment-by-moment path of “doing it” and excels at pointing out unrecognized opportunities for applying the dharma. We practice peace, Chödrön says, not by getting to some blissful, exalted state, but by relaxing in the middle of our aggression, our fear, and our insecurity: “If you want there to be peace—anything from peace of mind to peace on earth—here is the condensed instruction: stay with the initial tightening and don’t spin off. Keep it simple.”

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VETERANS OF WAR, VETERANS OF PEACE
Veterans Reflect on the Costs of War
Edited by Maxine Hong Kingston
Koa Books, 2006; 450 pp.; $17.95 (paper)

This collection of essays, poems, and stories was assembled by the National Book Award-winning author/teacher Maxine Hong Kingston, who has been leading meditation-and-writing workshops for veterans and their families for the last fifteen years. These writings on the conditions of war and the struggle to come to terms with life after it have an unpolished intensity that will move you to both sorrow and anger. Veterans is the second title from Koa Books, a new publishing house founded by Arnie Kotler, the founding director of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Parallax Press. Kotler has always promoted social activist voices, and the first two books from Koa—which means “fearless” or “warrior” in Hawaiian—show that he’s continuing in this vein. Koa’s first release was Not One More Mother’s Child, a collection of writings from the anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in spring 2004 in Iraq.

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HOW TO BE A PERFECT STRANGER
The Essential Religious Etiquette Handbook, 4th edition
Edited by Stuart M. Matlins & Arthur J. Magida
Skylight Paths, 2006; 432 pp.; $19.99 (paper)

If you’ve never set foot in a mosque or broken bread with a Mennonite, How to Be a Perfect Stranger is a rough guide to the foreign spiritual places right here at home. If you’re seeking theology, this is not your book, but if you’ve been invited to an event at an unfamiliar church, you’ll get some helpful guidelines: what the ceremony will look like, the language that might be used, special customs in the church, and even what to wear. The information for Perfect Stranger, now in its fourth edition, was gathered through detailed questionnaires sent to each denomination’s national office. In a couple of instances, that methodology is problematic (for example, there’s no spiritual head office for Native Americans), and so sometimes the information is too general to be helpful. The Buddhist section, for example, doesn’t distinguish between ethnic and convert Buddhist communities, or between the different schools of Buddhism, which are in style and language sometimes very different. Still, for improving intergroup understanding, this is a valuable handbook.

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NAGARJUNA’S LETTER TO A FRIEND
Translated by the Padmakara Translation Group
Commentary by Kyabje Kangyur Rinpoche
Snow Lion Publications, 2006; 208 pp.; $22.95 (cloth)

Letter to a Friend, by the third-century Indian sage Nagarjuna, is a classic of Buddhist literature referred to often by Tibetan teachers. Like Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, Letter to a Friend summarizes the entire Mahayana path, but it does so in a pithy 123 stanzas. This translation by the Padmakara Translation Group, which is based in France, upholds their reputation for excellent work, and the commentary by the late Kyabje Kangyur Rinpoche outlines a helpful structure for the poem and explains its more difficult points. You might think that an 800-year-old poem would not have much to say to a modern reader. But the original “friend” who received Nagarjuna’s pithy spiritual advice was a king who lived a relatively comfortable life and was prone to worldly distractions. Sounds familiar.

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SOINTULA
By Bill Gaston
Raincoast, 2006; 452 pp.; $15.95 (paper)

In this fifth novel by Buddhist fiction writer Bill Gaston, Evelyn, the unhappy, middle-aged wife of a small-city mayor forsakes her husband and her prescription drugs to tend at the bedside of her first lover, Claude. With Claude’s death, Evelyn sets out on an unlikely journey by kayak to Sointula, a remote fishing village on the north coast of Canada’s Vancouver Island in search of their estranged son, Tom, whom she hasn’t seen in ten years. Along the way Evelyn finds Peter Gore, a former high school teacher and wannabe travel-writer, who becomes her companion on a quirky journey. Sointula is a novel about willingly giving up one’s bearings—pharmaceutical, social, environmental—and relying only on the present moment and on the kindness of others. Gaston demonstrates how quickly we become outsiders, how tenuous is our hold on reality, and how tender are our human connections. ©

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Books in Brief, by Andrea McQuillin, Shambhala Sun, September 2006.

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