Claire Hoffman

For years I've told friends that I should write stories about Fairfield, Iowa and my childhood growing up in and around the Transcendental Meditation movement. Well last year someone beat me to it. Hoffman does an excellent job in this book, transporting me back to my childhood. As someone who rarely gets nostalgic, I was overcome with that very emotion.

The number of similarities between her personal story and my own are also uncanny. There are many, many rhyming moments between her life and mine that had me shaking my head. Of course, I moved away at a much younger age and was not steeped in TM like she was – I experienced a broader buffet of new age Indian meditation movements. We have very different stories, but I found hers fascinating for personal reasons more than anything else. It was sort of a peek into an alternate reality where I remained in Iowa through high school. It gets 4 stars for that. 3 if I was a stranger to the subject matter.

So can I recommend this to people as just an interesting book to read? Hmm... If you've ever heard about TM and want a simple, entertaining, and (in my opinion) relatively unbiased introduction to the movement's history and culture, this is a great book. Admittedly, I haven't read anything else on the subject, so I can't really compare. But this delivers a wonderful peek into that bizarre world nestled amidst the cornfields and pig farms of the Midwest. Hoffman is a strong writer and good storyteller. I will keep an eye out for her and see what she writes next.… (lisätietoja)

This is a fascinating look at Transcendental Meditation and enlightenment. I don't know much about meditation other than the most basic knowledge, so I was interested in reading about how a child grew up in the culture and returned as an adult, learning how to cope and how to grow and change, both as a mother and as a women and a wife.

Since the book is a memoir, there is obviously some information about her family history, but the book is mostly about the TM movement and its founder, but it's also to a certain extent a coming of age story. There's a lot of suffering here, but mostly it's about Claire's loneliness, something I think we can all relate to.

While this is a great memoir and is very well written, I did have a few issues with it. I felt Claire really skirted the truth about a lot of issues - she brought up some subjects / controversies, but really didn't dive into them - again, this book is a memoir and not a tell all, but in books like this I always say the same thing - why bring up the subject at all if you aren't going to delve into it?

I also didn't care for the ending, where Claire really glosses over the last few years of her life, only very briefly mentioning her time with her father / late teen/early adult years. Considering this book was supposed to be a contrast between her youth and her adult years, this was disappointing.

All in all, an interesting read about a subject I knew little about.

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received book from author as part of a book tour… (lisätietoja)