Two Words, One Answer.
Great Book
 The Tibetan Book of the Dead (A Way of Life / The Great Liberation) $24.98 This DVD is broken up into 2 parts one entitled "A Way of Life" and the other "The Great Liberation" each about 45 minutes in length. These episodes take a look into the life of the villages amongst the Himalayas where these people live Buddhism daily (not just practice it). There are 2 interesting story lines (one in each part) depicted of the rituals involved when a loved one passes. It shows how the Lama and his students perform the reading and ritual of sacred text to help the passed move into a better transition for re-birth. The second part is a little more of a telling of story rather than documentary. The narration throughout is a bit hypnotic and will provide a sense of a waking meditation as you listen and watch the information provided. I have seen some of these filmed excerpts in other documentaries, however this was the first to translate into English when the Lama was speaking in front of the dead and their family and friends. This representation of the Book of the Dead is both informative with detail and entertaining to watch. Anyone studying concepts of death, rebirth and/or the metaphysical will enjoy the information and presentation in this DVD. Students of metaphysics will also notice similarities between the Tibetan teachings of the continuation of life and other religious and philosophical teachings. A good one for the home collection. 4 stars. The Master Within by Gary Hopkins  Great Books $16.00 Note: This review is based on the unabridged audiobook narrated by Ed Asner. "Great Books" is itself a great book. The surface plot involves Denby's returning to his alma mater, Columbia University, to revisit (some of) the great books of the Western canon as a middle-aged adult, 30 years after first reading them as a young undergraduate. But this is no superficial treatment focused on frivolities related to going back to school. Instead, Denby goes deep, thus making the book intellectually elevated in a manner which befits the great books (mixed metaphor intended). He covers a sampling of these books and probes them with sensitivity, thereby giving us insights which are often penetrating and profound, and sometimes even rather original. He didn't say so, but I imagine that his professors were pleased. An added plus, which is what makes the book uniquely special, is that we get to see the difference between Denby's response to these books as a mature adult versus his younger formative years. For those of us in our own middle years, Denby thus gives us a sense of what we might gain from returning to these books. I agree with Denby's ultimate conclusion. The primary reason for reading these books isn't that we become trained to (ethnocentrically) value Western culture, but rather that, by wrestling earnestly (and sometimes painfully) with these books, we're stimulated to grow as individuals, but still each on our own path. Last but not least, Ed Asner did a fabulous job of narrating the book, thereby rendering the audiobook perhaps even superior in some ways to the print version. And this is on top of Denby doing a fabulous job of writing the book itself. Needless to say, I highly recommend this book to anyone open to the possibility of growing via encounter with the great books (and great books about the great books).  The Great Book of Amber: The Complete Amber Chronicles, 1-10 (Chronicles of Amber) $23.99 I first discovered this series as a teenager, and ever since the world of Amber has been an important part of my life. I reread these books all the time, and they never fail to amaze me. The characters -- Corwin, Random, Benedict, Merlin, Luke, Ghostwheel -- are like old friends, and the locations -- Amber, The Lighthouse at Cabra, Avalon, The Courts of Chaos, The Crystal Cave -- are like real places. In a lifetime devoted to reading, I've never encountered anything that fires on quite so many cylinders -- the action, the wit, the poetry, the imagination. Absolutely everyone should give this series a try. Roger Zelazny was one of the leading lights of the New Wave of the 1960s, which saw a rennaisance of literary experimentation in science fiction. Zelazny was a poet, an autodidact with a staggeringly wide-ranging intellect, captain of his college fencing team, a black belt in aikido, and held a degree from Columbia in Elizabethan drama. As a young man he caused a car crash which severely injured his then-fiancee, and guilt over this seems to have haunted him, as his work is filled with images of cars and car accidents (the Amber series begins with the protagonist awakening in a hospital following a terrible car accident with no memory of who he is). The pervasive sense of guilt and melancholy in Zelazny's work stands in striking counterpoint to his equally strong instinct for humor and playfulness. Zelazny is a masterful prose stylist, and the Amber books could be described as epic fantasy as written by Raymond Chandler. Zelazny's writing is highly allusive, and he constantly, casually tosses off references to Shakespeare, Carroll, Nabokov, Spenser, Browning, and dozens of others. The whole series is in some sense an elaboration of Plato's parable of the cave, as reality in Amber is always unreliable, and layers are constantly being peeled away to reveal deeper realities. Those who enjoy the mind-bending, paranoid, philosophical science fiction of Philip K. Dick will find many of the same pleasures here. All that said, the Amber series is far from perfect. The books often show signs of hasty composition and, as the series progresses, authorial fatigue. The ten books consist of two five-book cycles, each with its own protagonist. Many readers are of the opinion that the second cycle is dramatically inferior. I don't share that opinion, and I strongly recommend both series, but the second cycle certainly has some issues, most notoriously that the power of magic is escalated to such a degree as to severely unbalance the invented world. But if you've made it through Book 5, The Courts of Chaos, which is one of the weakest in the series, you should certainly continue on to the much-stronger Book 6, Trumps of Doom. (In my opinion the weakest books are The Courts of Chaos, Knight of Shadows, and Prince of Chaos, and the strongest are Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon, and Trumps of Doom.) Also, if you're not grabbed right away by Book 1, Nine Princes in Amber, you might try starting with Book 2, The Guns of Avalon, which in many ways provides a better introduction to the material. I read Book 2 first (inadvertently), and I've recommended this approach to several friends with good results. A final caveat about the Amber books: They periodically feature extended "shadow walking" sequences. These bits of stream-of-consciousness writing are intended to convey the experience of moving through a landscape of constantly shifting reality. It's an interesting experiment, but they have no bearing on the story and I find them pretty tedious, and as a kid I found them unbearable. Fortunately the distinctive typography in these sections (a profusion of ellipses) makes them easy to skip over. Amber fans will likely enjoy George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1) and Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora, and vice versa. |
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