Reviewed by Bhrigupada Dasa (Dr. Måns Broo)

At the confluence of the Saraswati, Yamuna, and Ganges rivers at Prayaga, two aging men meet in great happiness. They grew up as friends in rural Bangladesh, but their paths eventually branched off in different directions. One become a Vaishnava Hindu sannyasi, Saragrahi Swami Maharaja (“Swami”), the other, a Jesuit Christian monk, Father Frances Yona, S.J. (“Frank”). They lost track of each other, but after a chance meeting in Jaipur some years ago, the two began corresponding intermittently. Now, the two have decided to take the time to meet again, to sit down and discuss their respective traditions.

Steven Rosen (Satyaraja Dasa) is no novice to interreligious dialogue. In 1989, he published a small book called Kṛṣṇa Consciousness and Christianity: East-West Dialogues, consisting of discussions between himself and Rev. Alvin Van Pelt Hart, Director of Clinical Pastoral Education, St. Luke’s Hospital. This book was followed in 1990 by similar discussions with the (reputedly fictional) Jewish Rabbi Jacob N. Shimmel (Om Shalom: Judaism and Krishna Consciousness). Rosen has also written on Buddhism from a Vaishnava perspective (From Nothingness to Personhood: a collection of essays on Buddhism from a Vaishnava-Hindu perspective), though dispensing with the dialogic form there.

Even though the cover design of the Christ and Krishna is somewhat trite, the small format and the graphic layout of the work is pleasant and attractive. The chapters are divided by clear subheadings into eminently readable portions. As this is a book for a wide circle of readers, Rosen has wisely chosen to dispense with diacritics (e.g., writing “Krishna” instead of “Kṛṣṇa”). The book has no notes or bibliography, but since the quotations given in the book are usually clearly referenced, the curious reader will have little difficulty in looking them up.

In this book Steven Rosen utilizes a fictional setting for the dialogue. Much as in Srila Bhaktivinoda’s Jaiva Dharma, the plot and the characters can be said to be rather rudimentary. Readers expecting to see character development or a distinct literary prose are apt to be disappointed: the framework of the dialogue is just that, a framework. In fact, the characters are not very believable. Rather than sounding like two Bengalis, they come across as Steven Rosen and Alvin Van Pelt Hart. Frank refers to European Christian theologians such as Geddes MacGregor and Hans Küng rather than to Indian Christians such as Sunder Singh or Raymond Panikkar. Steven Rosen can be said to follow the approach of Yogi Ramacharaka (William Walker Atkinson) and other early Western writers on Hinduism, whose Indian spiritual teachers rather ludicrously quote their Latin and Greek classics with ease ‒ but whom Western readers also could identify with, and therefore learn essential aspects of Indian thinking from. It is precisely in this bridging of East and West that Rosen has always been at his very best. If I had Christian friends or relatives that were opposed to my Vaishnava Hindu religion, this is just the book I would give them.

Interreligious dialogue is often held to have begun with the famous Chicago World Parliament of Religions in 1893, and is generally supposed to lead to mutual understanding rather than religious conversion. Reasons for engaging in such dialogue may nevertheless vary. Sometimes “dialogue” is a mere front for proselytizing. Scholars of interreligious dialogue call this “discursive dialogue”; Martin Buber may be less polite but more to the point when he calls it “monologue disguised as dialogue.” Engaging in interreligious dialogue is also a way for small, little-understood religious movements to get to play with the big boys, as it were, and gain both credibility as “real religions” and important social connections. Especially when faced with external threats (e.g., from the anti-cult movement), such movements often evince a new-found enthusiasm for dialogue.

In his introduction, Steven Rosen argues for a kind of philosophia perennis or essential spirituality found in all the major religions behind external appearances such as dogma and rituals. This essence, or soul of religion, to use Rosen’s term, is found in mysticism. However, in the book itself, it is only the two concluding chapters that deal with mysticism in the two religious traditions. Before that, Rosen sets the stage by having his protagonists discuss potentially divisive issues such as religious conversion, vegetarianism, reincarnation, and the identity of Jesus. The material here is not new. Bhaktipada’s widely distributed Christ and Kṛṣṇa: The Path of Pure Devotion from 1986 deals with many of the same issues. In fact, many of these chapters read as abridgements of Rosen’s earlier work on these topics, and some of Father Frances’ statements are taken over verbatim from Rev. Alvin Van Pelt Hart. But this should not be seen as a blemish: it would be foolish for Rosen not to repeat what his earlier work has taught him. Similar reuse of material can be seen in the works of many of his predecessors, such as Srila Jiva Goswami, who in his Krama-sandarbha simply reshuffles the contents of his Bhagavata-Sandarbha. What is more, as always, Rosen’s text is very enjoyable reading. I cannot think of any other text that would give as useful an overview of all of his work as this one does.

Now, while acknowledging the essential truth of all religions, Rosen maintains that the Vedic (understood in the modern, broad sense) literature, “objectively speaking,” represents the “unabridged dictionary” of the truth. This can be seen throughout the book, where it is generally the Swami who leads the discussion; Frank comes close to accepting even the transmigration of souls (though perhaps in the interest of fairness, Rosen does on the other hand have the Swami subscribe to the “fall from Vaikuntha”-theory—very similar to the Christian idea of falling from grace).

At any rate, this is certainly discursive dialogue—Rosen in no way hides his own Vaishnava affiliation, though compared to Kṛṣṇa Consciousness and Christianity, he is here much more of a listener, and his own tone is quite different—but it also makes sense. In order to point toward the harmony of the mystical aspects of Christianity and Vaishnava Hinduism, Rosen wishes to show how even the most divisive doctrinal differences of these two traditions may be reconciled. Scholars may point out weaknesses in specific arguments or examples (for me personally, particularly the arguments for Jesus’ visit to India seem weak, and the account of the description of Jesus in the Bhavisya Purana is glaringly inaccurate), but even in our present “post-secular” times, it is Christianity, not Vaishnavism, that holds the upper hand in situations of dialogue. There is therefore a clear need for books that reverse this situation, something that this book does already by its setting, locating the dialogue at a Hindu sacred place in India. When this reversal of power is furthermore done in such a respectful and thoughtful way as in this text, one is left with no other option than congratulating the author. Steven Rosen remains one of the most important voices of Western Vaishnavism.

Kim Plofker, Mathematics in India. Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2008.

Reviewed by David Mumford

Did you know that Vedic priests were using the socalled Pythagorean theorem to construct their fire altars in 800 BCE?; that the differential equation for the sine function, in finite difference form, was described by Indian mathematician-astronomers in the fifth century CE?; and that “Gregory’s” series π/4 = 1−1/3 +1/5 −· · · was proven using the power series for arctangent and, with ingenious summation methods, used to accurately compute π in southwest India in the fourteenth century? If any of this surprises you, Plofker’s book is for you.

Her book fills a huge gap: a detailed, eminently readable, scholarly survey of the full scope of Indian¹ mathematics and astronomy (the two were inseparable in India) from their Vedic beginnings to roughly 1800. There is only one other survey, Datta and Singh’s 1938 History of Hindu Mathematics, recently reprinted but very hard to obtain in the West (I found a copy in a small specialized bookstore in Chennai). They describe in some detail the Indian work in arithmetic and algebra and, supplemented by the equally hard to find Geometry in Ancient and Medieval India by Sarasvati Amma (1979), one can get an overview of most topics.² But the drawback for Westerners is that neither gives much historical context or explains the importance of astronomy as a driving force for mathematical research in India. While Western scholars have been studying traditional Indian mathematics since the late eighteenth century and Indian scholars have been working hard to assemble and republish surviving Sanskrit manuscripts, a widespread appreciation of the greatest achievements and the unique characteristics of the Indian approach to mathematics has been lacking in the West. Standard surveys of the history of mathematics hardly scratch the surface in telling this story.³ Today, there is a resurgence of activity in this area both in India and the West. The prosperity and success of India has created support for a new generation of Sanskrit scholars to dig deeper into the huge literature still hidden in Indian libraries. Meanwhile the shift in the West toward a multicultural perspective has allowed us Westerners to shake off old biases and look more clearly at other traditions. This book will go a long way to opening the eyes of all mathematicians and historians of mathematics to the rich legacy of mathematics to which India gave birth.

The first episode in the story of Indian mathematics is that of the Sulba-sutras, “The rules of the cord”, described in section 2.2 of Plofker’s book.⁴ These are part of the “limbs of the Vedas”, secular compositions⁵ that were orally transmitted, like the sacred verses of the Vedas themselves. The earliest, composed by Baudh¯ayana, is thought to date from roughly 800 BCE. On the one hand, this work describes rules for laying out with cords the sacrificial fire altars of the Vedas. On the other hand, it is a primer on plane geometry, with many of the same constructions and assertions as those found in the first two books of Euclid. In particular, as I mentioned above, one finds here the earliest explicit statement of “Pythagorean” theorem (so it might arguably be called Baudh¯ayana’s theorem). It is completely clear that this result was known to the Babylonians circa 1800 BCE, but they did not state it as such—like all theirmathematical results, it is only recorded in examples and in problems using it. And, to be sure, there are no justifications for it in the Sulba-sutras either—these sutras are just lists of rules. But Pythagorean theorem was very important because an altar often had to have a specific area, e.g., two or three times that of another. There is much more in these sutras: for example, Euclidean style “geometric algebra”, very good approximations to p2, and reasonable approximations to π.

Another major root of Indian mathematics is the work of Panini and Pingala (perhaps in the fifth century BCE and the third century BCE respectively), described in section 3.3 of Plofker’s book Though Panini is usually described as the great grammarian of Sanskrit, codifying the rules of the language that was then being written down for the first time, his ideas have a much wider significance than that. Amazingly, he introduced abstract symbols to denote various subsets of letters and words that would be treated in some common way in some rules; and he produced rewrite rules that were to be applied recursively in a precise order.⁶  One could say without exaggeration that he anticipated the basic ideas of modern computer science. One wishes Plofker had described Panini’s ideas at more length. As far as I know, there is no exposition of his grammar that would make it accessible to the non-linguist/Sanskrit scholar. P. P. Divakaran has traced the continuing influence of the idea of recursion on Indian mathematics,⁷ leading to the thesis that this is one of the major distinctive features of Indian mathematics.

Pingala, who came a few centuries later, analyzed the prosody of Sanskrit verses. To do so, he introduced what is essentially binary notation for numbers, along with Pascal’s triangle (the binomial coefficients). His work started a long line of research on counting patterns, including many of the fundamental ideas of combinatorics (e.g., the “Fibonacci” sequence appears sometime in 500-800 CE in the work of Virahanka). There is an interesting treatment of this early period of Indian mathematics in Frits Staal’s excellent recent book Discovering the Vedas,⁸ ch.14. For example, Staal traces recursion back to the elaborate and precise structure of Vedic rituals. After this period, unfortunately, one encounters a gap, and very little survives to show what mathematicianswere thinking about formore than 500 years. This was the period of Alexander’s invasion, the Indo-Greek Empire that existed side by side with the Mauryan dynasty including Asoka’s reign, and the Indo-Scythian and Kushan empires that followed. It was a period of extensive trade between India and the West, India and China. Was there an exchange of mathematical ideas too? No one knows, and this has become a rather political point. Plofker, I believe, does a really good job discussing the contentious issues, stating in section 4.6 the “consensus” view but also the other points of view. She states carefully the arguments on both sides and lets the reader take away what he or she will. She deals similarly with the early influences from the Middle East in section 2.5 and of the exchanges with the Islamic world in Chapter 8. For my part, I follow my late colleague David Pingree,whotrainedawhole generationof scholars in ancient mathematics and astronomy. He argues that the early version of Greek astronomy, due to Hipparchus, reached India along with Greek astrology. The early Indian division of the ecliptic into twenty-eight Naksatras, (the moon slept with a different wife every night in each trip around the ecliptic)was replaced by theGreek zodiac of twelve solar constellations and—more to the point—an analysis of solar, lunar, and planetary motion based on epicycles appears full-blown in the great treatise, the Aryabhatiya of Aryabhata, written in 499 CE. But also many things in the Indian treatment are totally different from the Greek version. Their treatment of spherical trigonometry is based on three-dimensional projections, using right triangles inside the sphere,⁹ an approach which I find much simpler and more natural than Ptolemy’s use of Menelaus’s theorem. Above all, as mentioned above, they found the finite difference equation satisfied by samples sin(n..θ) of sine (see Plofker, section 4.3.3). This seems to have set the future development of mathematics and astronomy in India on a path totally distinct from anything in the West (or in China).

Download the entire review in PDF format, here.

1. The word “India” is used in Plofker’s book and in my review to indicate the whole of the Indian subcontinent, including especially Pakistan, where many famous centers of scholarship, e.g., Takshila, were located.
2. For those who might be in India and want to find copies, Datta and Singh’s book is published by Bharatiya Kala Prakashan, Delhi, and Amma’s book by Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi. An excellent way to trace the literature is through Hayashi’s article “Indian mathematics” in the AMS’s CD History of Mathematics from Antiquity to the Present: A Selective Annotated Bibliography (2000).
3. The only survey that comes close is Victor Katz’s A History of Mathematics.
4. There are multiple ways to transcribe Sanskrit (and Hindi) characters into Roman letters. We follow the precise scholarly system, as does Plofker (cf. her Appendix A) which uses diacritical marks: (i) long vowels have a bar over them; (ii) there are “retroflex” versions of t, d, and n where the tongue curls back, indicated by a dot beneath the letter; (iii) h, as in th, indicates aspiration, a breathy sound, not the English “th”; and (iv) the “sh” sound is written either as ´s or as s. (the two are distinguishable to Indians but not native English speakers).
5. Technically, they are called smrti (“remembered text”) as opposed to sruti (“heard”, i.e., from divine sources).
6. To get a glimpse of this, see Plofker, p. 54; F. Staal, “Artificial languages across sciences and civilization”, J. Indian Philosophy, pp. 89–141 (esp. sections 11–12), 2006; or B. Gillon, “Astadhyayi and linguistic theory”, J. Indian Philosophy, pp. 445–468, 2007.
7. “Notes on Yukti-Bhasa: Recursive methods in Indian mathematics”, forthcoming in a book entitled Studies in the History of Mathematics in India.
8. Penguin Books, 2008.
9. A basic formula in the Gola section of the Aryabhatiyais that if P is a point on the ecliptic with longitude λ, then the declination δ of P is given by sin(δ) = sin(λ). sin(i), i the inclination of the ecliptic. If I understand it right, later writings suggest this was proven by considering the planar right triangle given by P, P1, P2, where P1 is the orthogonal projection of P onto the plane of the equator (inside the sphere!) and P2 is its projection onto the line through Υ, the intersection of the equator and the ecliptic. It is immediate to derive the formula using this triangle.

Food for the Soul: Vegetarianism and Yoga Traditions

Reviewed by Charles S. J. White, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion, American University, Washington, D.C.

This is a book that needed to be written. Period. Today, yoga is often thought of as a catch-phrase for exercises of a particular kind, and few know—or care—about its hoary roots in Hindu tradition. Those who do know are divided about whether or not one needs to be a vegetarian. But as Rosen and other well-chosen contributors prove in this edited volume—there really should be no question about a yogi’s diet. Yoga means higher consciousness, and higher consciousness means love and compassion. Indeed, Patanjali and other early authorities on the yoga tradition assert that ahimsa, nonaggression, is as integral to yoga as meditation is, and Rosen’s contributors cite all the right sources, making this clear and obvious—and also that this nonaggression extends to the point of vegetarianism.

And speaking of the contributors, Rosen, for this book, brilliantly gathered together representatives of all the modern yoga schools, from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to Swami Satchidananda, from Jivamukti to Jain yoga traditions. The net result is that the reader becomes privy to all the voices necessary to understand yoga and its authentic connection to a harmless diet. Each major yoga school is represented, both by practitioners and by scholars, so that readers become aware of all the arguments involved, and, in the end, see the reality of the subject at hand: that one needs to adhere to a non-meat diet if one hopes to practice yoga in the proper way.

Rosen’s introductory article particularly intrigued me. He shows that, though there are clearly exceptions, most yoga lineages today can be traced to two accomplished yogis in the tradition: Sri Krishnamacharya and Swami Sivananda. Krishnamacharya is the fount of teachers such as K. Pattabhi Jois, T. K. V. Desikachar, and B. K. S. Iyengar, whose techniques consist of Ashtanga-Vinyasa, Viniyoga, and the Iyengar Method, respectively. Sivananda’s tradition, on the other hand, gave rise to the Integral Yoga Institute, Swami Satchidananda, Swami Chinmayananda, and others. Rosen’s point is as follows: most yoga practitioners today use the methods formulated by these two men, either as they were originally espoused or in conjunction with other methods. And both these men promoted vegetarianism! Clearly, then, all groups and lineages that sprouted from these sources should promote the same teachings they did, including vegetarianism.

Then after making his point, Rosen engages many voices of authorities on yoga to speak for themselves, as already stated, so that by the end of the book, there is no question of an alternative point of view, at least not if one is practicing authentic yoga.

As an addendum, albeit an important one, Rosen offers two final essays, one by Joshua Greene and another authored by Rosen himself, on the subject of bhakti-yoga, which, according to the Bhagavad-gita (6.47), is the culminating yoga system in the practice of yoga. Here, again, we see that vegetarianism is unequivocally mandated. In this way, it becomes clear that there is simply no arguing the point—from the most basic forms of yoga to the most advanced, vegetarianism is unavoidable if one wants to reach perfection in practice.

For those who are meat-eating yogis, wanting an easy way out, this book is to be avoided at all costs. If, however, you are either a vegetarian or someone who is sitting on the fence—a sincere meat eater who is ready to give up eating meat for his or her practice of yoga—this book will offer much direction, knowledge, and food for thought.

(Ordering info: http://www.abc-clio.com/product.aspx?id=2147508103)

Reviewed by Bhrigupada dasa

Steven J. Rosen (Satyaraja Dasa) is one of the most prolific of our modern Gaudiya Vaishnava authors, with innumerable books and articles to his credit. Not only is his production large, it is also extremely variegated: he has authored everything from Vaishnava hagiography (Black Lotus: The Spiritual Journey of an Urban Mystic) to interfaith dialogues (Krishna Consciousness and Christianity: East-West Dialogues), popular presentations on vegetarianism and spirituality (Diet for Transcendence: Vegetarianism and the World Religions), and scholarly presentations on Vaishnava Hinduism (Essential Hinduism). Additionally, in several books he has engaged in a fruitful dialogue with popular culture (e.g. In Defense of Reality, Jedi in the Lotus: a Hindu Perspective on Star Wars). Many are the young Krishna devotees that have been inspired by his way of showing that one can walk the bhakti path without turning into an automaton or losing one’s sense of what’s happening. On top of this, Steven Rosen is also founding editor of Journal of Vaishnava Studies, an important academic journal that will soon celebrate its twentieth year of continuous publication.

In Krishna’s Other Song, Steven Rosen attempts something new: scriptural commentary. As the title indicates, he has done so with Krishna’s better-known Gita before (Krishna’s Song: a new look at the Bhagavad Gita, 2007), but while Krishna’s Song was a collection of essays on the Bhagavad-gita, Krishna’s Other Song is a translation of and commentary on the original verses of a related text, the Uddhava-gita. The reason for this difference is not difficult to understand: while there are many different Vaishnava Bhagavad-gitas readily available, there is a clear need for a readable Uddhava-gita from Vaishnava perspective. By leaving out the Sanskrit and keeping the commentary short and to the point, Rosen manages to present the whole Uddhava-gita in less than 300 pages. Hardbound and with an attractive cover, this makes for very appealing packaging.

What about the contents, then? First of all, it is no mean feat that Rosen has managed to engage noted Hinduism scholar Charles S.J. White to write a brief but very informative and positive Foreword. This is followed by a brief Introduction, in which Rosen locates the Uddhava-gita within its larger context, the Bhagavata Purana, but also offers the reader some hints into the uniquely Gaudiya Vaishnava insights on Uddhava, as detailed in works such as Rupa Goswami’s Uddhava Sandesha. Rosen then gives a very useful summary of the Uddhava-gita as a whole, ending with a few lines about his translation and commentary.

As Rosen himself writes, his edition is not meant to be a literal translation. Since Rosen is not a Sanskritist, that would probably not have been possible, but most of all, such a translation would not have accomplished his purpose: to bring out the essential devotional meaning of the Uddhava-gita by paraphrasing the text according to the understanding of the Gaudiya Vaishnava teachers. In practical terms, this means that the verses of the original text have been rendered into separate pieces of easy English prose in the style of Srila Prabhupada. In terms of layout, the translations are indented and printed in bold. This is graphically not a very attractive solution, especially in the cases where there is little commentary.

I should have wished for a little more stringency in the translations. Sometimes for example the term bhakti is left untranslated, sometimes it is translated as “spiritual devotion” and at other times as “devotional service”.  Phrases such as “make no mistake” and “this is the point” or terms such as “spiritual seekers” may make for easy reading, but at least to my ears, they sound rather too modern in an ancient text. But in general, the translation is very clear and readable, and since that is Rosen’s explicit goal, he must be said to have succeeded well.

However, I do have one other gripe with the language: while the book downplays or even hides the connection between the author and Iskcon—Srila Prabhupada and even some present Iskcon gurus are mentioned several times but never the movement itself—the language is to a large extent the same old Iskcon lingo. Since Steven Rosen in no way is an insulated temple devotee, it is both surprising and disappointing to see him use words such as sun planet, pastimes, or deity worship when trying to reach a general, spiritually interested audience.

While much of the commentary simply elucidates difficult concepts in the text itself (such as some of the details of Varnashram society), one consistent thrust is aimed at refuting a non-dualist understanding of the Uddhava-gita. Considering that the best-known translation available of this text (by Swami Ambikananda Saraswati) is heavily slanted in this “mayavadi” direction, this decision is both understandable and corrective, but I think a more nuanced understanding could have been possible. Rosen himself hints at this when he speaks of the “advaitic theism” of the Bhagavata Purana (p. 7), borrowing Daniel Sheridan’s apposite phrase. Another general theme is comparisons with the Bhagavad-gita and, to a smaller extent, Patañjali’s Yoga Sutra, which is often quite useful. From time to time, Rosen also engages in interreligious comparisons (e.g., 7, 28, 268), but the limited amount of space at his disposal perhaps restrained him here.

This limitation of space also limits the usefulness of the commentary. I would especially have liked to see more of what I feel Rosen does best: presenting ancient teachings in a way relevant for people of today. There are attempts at this here and there, particularly in the last chapter (on bhakti-yoga), but Rosen must have felt restrained by the format of the book. It seems to me that he would have come into his own if another devotee (e.g. Graham Schweig) had done a straight translation and he could have written a separate book on the Uddhava-gita instead.

In closing, it should be noted that whatever negative critique I have offered above has been stated with much reluctance. It is doubtful whether any other living Gaudiya Vaishnava has done more to bring Srila Prabhupada’s teachings into new circles: popular, spiritual and academic. In doing this, Rosen has several times had to take stern criticism from more fundamentalist quarters of Iskcon, but he has not let it change his agenda.  I have personally benefitted greatly from both his books and his journal, in the latter case both as a reader and contributor. If Steven Rosen would permit it, though I doubt he would, I would hold his feet on my head. This book is an important addition to the library of any spiritual seeker. The Uddhava-gita deserves many more readers, and will surely find many of them through Rosen’s new edition.

The following first appeared on Religion Dispatches. Read more and sign up for their free daily newsletter here.

Philip Goldberg, American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West. Harmony Books, 2010.

Reviewed by Michael J. Altman:

A Methodist church near my house advertises for “Gentle Yoga Classes” on one of those church signs usually reserved for witty and redemptive one-liners like “Jesus: Your Get Out of Hell Free Card.” Meanwhile, a local pizza place lists a “Kosmic Karma” pie on its menu. Indian spiritual language has crept into American vernacular culture. But where did it come from? Is there some connection between karmic pizza and yoga in church?

In American Veda, Philip Goldberg tells the story of a new American tradition, derived from both the practices of yoga, and the philosophy of Vedanta. He names this “Vedanta-Yoga,” as distinguished from other aspects of Hindu religious culture (such as the worship of multi-limbed deities) that might be less meaningful for Americans.

For Goldberg, it all adds up to the slow “Vedicization” of American spirituality. By this he means that Americans have become more comfortable with a view of the world ultimately found in the ancient literature of India—the Vedas, the Upanisads, and the Bhagavad-gita. First, there is the idea that the self and the ground of Being (or the Divine, God, Brahman, Consciousness, etc.) are one. The full realization of this truth leads to liberation and the cessation of suffering. Second, there are a number of paths toward this realization and no single path works for everyone. Third, it follows then that, at bottom, all religious and spiritual traditions, while looking different, share the same goal of divine realization. Vedanta-Yoga is thus a monist, pluralist, and perennialist tradition of American spirituality built from Indian religious sources.

Two Hundred Years of American Vedanta

In the nineteenth century the first wave of Vedic thought broke on American shores. Transcendentalists, including Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, read the Bhagavad Gita and found in it a spiritual solution to the materialism of early American industrialism. Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott turned to Vedic sources and combined them with Western esoteric and occult traditions to produce Theosophy. Goldberg also finds Vedic influences in the 19th-century births of Christian Science and New Thought movements.

The nineteenth century was capped off with the 1893 arrival of Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk and disciple of the Bengali guru Ramakrishna, to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago where he spoke to a crowd of liberal Protestants about the basics of Vedanta philosophy. Vivekananda stuck around and established the Vedanta Societies that are still with us today. Vivekananda offered a flesh and blood example of the Vedic philosophy Americans had found in ancient Indian texts throughout the century.

The second wave of Vedic influence reached its apex in the counterculture of the 1960s but has its roots in much earlier in the twentieth century. Decades before the Beatles met the Maharishi, a set of public intellectuals that included the likes of Joseph Campbell and Aldous Huxley propagated Vedic ideas they learned from Vivekananda’s Vedanta Society. The popularity of Swami Yogananda and his Autobiography of a Yogi gave Vedanta-Yoga further steam in the middle of the century. In the 1950s, the writings of Indian gurus like Sri Aurobindo found their way into America and the American Academy of Asian Studies was founded in 1951. Then came the Maharishi. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi founded Transcendental Meditation and taught the Beatles to meditate. The Hare Krishnas came too. By the 1970s, following changes in American immigration laws, a whole generation of Indian gurus and yogis brought Vedanta-Yoga to America. Goldberg calls these the “Baby Boomer’s Babas.” This was the period of building institutions for Americans to practice yoga, meditate, pursue the study of Vedanta, and gather around a guru.

In the wake of institution-building the final wave pushed Vedanta-Yoga out into the broader cultural streams. Homegrown American advocates such as Ram Dass and Deepak Chopra emerged. Academic “pandit practitioners” taught in religion and theology departments, deepening Americans’ understanding of Vedic thought. Artists like John Coltrane were drawn to Vedic philosophy and Indian music. In the field of science, physicists saw a parallel to their discoveries in quantum physics in Vedanta philosophy.

Vedanta-Yoga became such a part of of American culture that other religions could apparently not resist it—thus came Christian yoga, Jewish yoga, and the sign at my local Methodist church. The Vedicization of America continues, argues Goldberg, as the millennial generation absorbs Vedic ideas and yogic practices. For Goldberg, the “spiritual but not religious crowd” is just the latest version of American Vedanta-Yoga.

A Nation of Pragmatic Mystics

Goldberg’s narrative is expansive. He constructs a broad history for Vedanta-Yoga in America that ranges from Madonna to religion scholar Huston Smith. But more than just expansive, Goldberg’s narrative is itself ever-expanding. It is a story of cultural development that mirrors the personal development of the yogi or vedantan. As Goldberg tells it, from its earliest nineteenth century encounter forward, American culture has been on a path of enlightenment and liberation that continues toward more and more spiritual freedom. Built into this narrative of national and cultural development enlightenment are tropes of the free market. Gurus and yogis succeeded in the religious marketplace, Goldberg argues, because they provided Americans spiritual commodities that worked. Furthermore, those yogis and gurus that were best able to adapt themselves to the American market were most successful. Yoga, stripped down to poses, whipped people into shape. Transcendental Meditation (which Maharishi stressed was a practice and not religious) lowered stress. Vedanta-Yoga offered a spiritual wholeness to practitioners but also adapted to the market. But Vedic teaching and practice worked, so Americans bought it. As Goldberg puts it, we are a nation of “pragmatic mystics.”

If there is one problem at the heart of Goldberg’s analysis, though, it is his reliance on a reductive vision of the difference between East and West. As Goldberg tells it, in the past two centuries the spiritual East (read India) has brought spirituality to the materialist West. In this view, the West is materialist, outward, scientific, and ego-building while the East is spiritual, inward, mystical, and ego-transcending. Vedicization, then, is the synthesis of these two poles into a new American spirituality of practical mysticism.

Such a narrative ignores both material realities in India and spiritual realities in America. To pick just one example, Swami Vivekananda was the product of a Bengali society greatly affected by British imperialism. He was part of a nouveau riche class in and around Calcutta. He got a Western education from a Protestant missionary college and he was the product of the Bengali Renaissance triggered by the economic, colonial, and cultural encounter between Indians and Britons. Meanwhile, American culture has its own history of mystical, esoteric, and spiritual resources. While Theosophists, Christian Scientists, Transcendentalists, and New Thoughters were influenced by Vedic texts, they were also part of a long Western tradition of esotericism and metaphysics. Emmanuel Swedenborg and Franz Anton Mesmer had has much if not more influence on these groups as Vedic texts. The “spiritual East comes to the material West” narrative is powerful but it is over-simple.

This is not just Goldberg’s narrative. It was also Emerson’s, Vivekananda’s, and the Maharishi’s. In this way, Goldberg is writing from within the Vedanta-Yoga tradition he describes. I doubt he would dispute this. This position within the tradition has given him a passion and a vision for all the ways it has influenced America, and Goldberg’s book offers a wonderfully comprehensive account of the many places Vedanta-Yoga has filtered into our culture.

While his advocacy for the cause may oversimplify things at times, the accessibility of his writing and the broad scope of his material make up for it. For “the spiritual but not religious” wondering how they got there, for those wondering who those Indian dudes are on the cover of Sergeant Pepper, and for Methodists doing yoga, Goldberg offers an important story of America’s practical mysticism.

Reviewed by Ned Denny

Reviewed by Sarah Blakewell

For Friedrich Nietzsche, the answer was obvious: to test a philosophy, find out if you can live by it. This is “the only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something,” he wrote in 1874. It’s also the form of critique that is generally overlooked in the philosophy faculties of universities. Nietzsche therefore dismissed the professional discipline as irrelevant, a “critique of words by means of other words,” and devoted himself to pursuing an idiosyncratic philosophical quest outside the academy. As for texts, he wrote, “I for one prefer reading Diogenes Laertius” — the popular third-century Epicurean author of a biographical compilation called “Lives of the Eminent Philosophers.” If the proof of philosophy lies in life, then what could be more useful than reading about how the great philosophers have lived?

As James Miller shows in his fascinating “Examined Lives,” choosing Diogenes Laertius over more rigorous treatises was provocative because it challenged an idea already predominant in Nie­tzsche’s time: that a philosophy should be objectively valid, without the need to refer to particular quirks or life experiences on the part of its originator. Diogenes Laertius represents an older tradition, which sees philosophy not as a set of precepts but as something one learns by following a wise man — sometimes literally following him wherever he goes, listening, and observing how he handles situations. The “Lives” offers its readers a vicarious opportunity to try this with a number of philosophers, and see whose way works best.

Miller has now had the superb idea of taking Diogenes Laertius as a model, while simultaneously using this model to test whether such an approach can still offer us anything of value. He covers 12 philosophers: Socrates, Plato, Diogenes the Cynic (not to be confused with Laertius), Aristotle, Seneca, Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Emerson and Nietzsche. In each case, he explores the life selectively, looking for “crux” points and investigating how ideas of the philosophical life have changed. Few readers will be astounded to learn that philosophers make as much of a mess of their lives as anyone else. But Miller, a professor of politics at the New School and author of a biography of Michel Foucault, among other books, does not rest with digging out petty failings or moments of hypocrisy. He shows us philosophers becoming ever more inclined to reflect on these failings, and suggests that this makes their lives more rather than less worth studying.

His starting point is Socrates, the most mythologized of all thinkers, the original source of the statement that “the unexamined life is not worth living” and the philosopher whose life became the measure for all others. Early biographers wrote with awe of Socrates’ strange, itinerant approach to wisdom; of his habit of hanging around the marketplace striking up conversations with any passer-by willing to talk or of standing motionless in the street all night while he thought a problem through. But what really set him apart was his death, which redefined his whole life. Condemned by a panel of 501 Athenian citizens to kill himself with hemlock, Socrates carried out the sentence with perfect composure and in full rational awareness — or so the myth has it. No greater confirmation of the value of a philosopher’s existence could be imagined. As Socrates himself said, “Don’t you think that actions are more reliable evidence than words?”

The rest of “Examined Lives”can be read as a history of other philosophers’ failures to measure up to this ideal, either in their deaths or their lives. One of Miller’s great transitional figures is the Roman court-philosopher Seneca. Living half a millennium after Socrates, he too was condemned to death by suicide. He accepted his fate with Socratic courage, but his death itself was difficult. He slit his wrists before begging for a cup of hemlock and retiring to a hot bath to expire. The messiness of his death reflected a morally messy life. For, while his writings promoted wisdom, balance, restraint and detachment, Seneca himself was forced into numerous compromises in the service of his protégé and employer, the murderous emperor Nero. He even helped Nero plot the murder of Agrippina, the emperor’s own mother. The strain was evident. “I am not wise,” Seneca wrote; “nor . . . shall I ever be.” Yet he also advised his favorite correspondent, Lucilius, to “harmonize talk with life.” As Miller remarks, Seneca was “in conflict” with himself.

Read the entire New York Times article, here.

Actually, as the brilliant French social scientist Olivier Roy points out in “Holy Ignorance,” it is those defending Christmas who are not being true to their traditions and teachings. There are no Christmas dinners in the Bible, which is why America’s Puritans, strict adherents of what that venerated text offers, never sat down by the raging fire awaiting St. Nick; indeed, they briefly banned Christmas in Massachusetts.

Yule as we celebrate it today owes more to Charles Dickens than to Thomas Aquinas. Our major solstice holiday is what Roy calls a “cultural construct” rather than a sectarian ceremony, which explains why Muslims buy halal turkeys and Jews transformed Hanukkah into a gift-giving occasion. Mistakenly believing that Christmas is sacred, those who defend it find themselves propping up the profane. The Christ they want in Christmas is a product not of Nazareth but of Madison Avenue.

Over the past few years, a number of theories have been offered about the rise of fundamentalism. Roy proposes the most original — and the most persuasive. Fundamentalism, in his view, is a symptom of, rather than a reaction against, the increasing secularization of society. Whether it takes the form of the Christian right in the United States or Salafist purity in the Muslim world, fundamentalism is not about restoring a more authentic and deeply spiritual religious experience. It is instead a manifestation of holy ignorance, Roy’s biting term meant to characterize the worldview of those who, having lost both their theology and their roots, subscribe to ideas as incoherent as they are ultimately futile. The most important thing to know about those urging the restoration of a lost religious authenticity is that they are sustained by the very forces they denounce.

Two tectonic shifts have produced the gap that fundamentalism fills. One concerns the question that has dominated the sociology of religion for more than a century: Will faith decline as modernity advances? The great thinkers of another era — Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber — believed that in one way or another it would. Today’s leading sociologists point to Jerry Falwell and Osama bin Laden to claim that it will not. Roy stands with yesterday’s giants. It is true, he concedes, that conservative religion is growing. But any talk of a religious revival is “an optical illusion.” Religion, he writes, “is both more visible and at the same time frequently in decline.” It cedes so much to the secular world that it can no longer offer a transcendental alternative to it.

We are, in addition, witnessing the severing of religion from the cultures within which it was once embedded. Religion and culture have long existed in an uneasy embrace. Catholicism is presumably a universal faith, yet long before the reforms of Vatican II allowed Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular, Brazilian Catholicism owed as much to its South American roots as Polish Catholicism did to its Eastern European ones. Islam sought to conquer the world, or as much of it as it could, yet it was intimately connected to the Arab culture in which it was born. The only reason we do not find the term “secular Jew” puzzling is because we appreciate that Judaism is both an ethnic and a religious category. Much the same can be said for many of the other world religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism.

If religion is in decline in the modern world, Roy argues, so is culture. On the one hand, we have multiculturalism, celebrations of diversity that somehow wind up making all cultures look and feel alike. More important, we face globalization, today’s true universal faith, which subjects all local customs to the laws of the market. Under the influence of both, religion loses whatever affinities it may once have had with the cultures that sustained it. Jakarta, the capital of the world’s largest Muslim country, lies some 5,000 miles from the holy city of Mecca, and even Mecca, Roy argues, has lost much of its specifically Arab character.

Japanese pilgrims travel to San Francisco to find a more vibrant Buddhist culture than Tokyo can offer. Mormons, no longer confined to Utah, find adherents in Manila. Even the Christian Orthodox churches that are defined by their countries of origin lose their ethnic character; significant numbers of adherents to Orthodoxy in France have refused to come under the authority of the Russian patriarch.

Culture’s stickiest component is language. When the word of God was literally expressed in words, language inhibited religious expansion; preachers could speak only to those who understood what they were saying. With the rise of Pentecostalism, one of the fastest-growing religions in the world, followers are encouraged to speak in tongues, which requires no language at all. Meanwhile television and the Internet contribute to fundamentalism’s appeal; both make it possible for Egyptian imams (preaching no doubt in “globish,” the pidgin form of English that emerges wherever globalization takes root) to reach their followers in Europe. One does not know whether to be in awe of faith’s capacity to adapt or distraught by the hodgepodge that enables it to do so. “The Holy Spirit,” Roy writes, “is anywhere and everywhere. There is no need to have a real rock on which to build the Church.” God only knows what St. Peter would make of that.

Roy’s “Failure of Political Islam,” published in French in 1992 and English in 1994, infuriated those who viewed radical Islam as the major enemy of the West. Roy maintained in that book that Islamism, the perversion of Muslim faith into a utopian political movement, had little to offer ordinary Muslims and would therefore be unable to remain in power very long. (In subsequent work, Roy argues, I believe convincingly, that the ideology currently governing Iran or motivating Hamas has more to do with nationalism than with religion.) This is not a point of view that sits well with those who consider something they call Islamofascism the greatest threat to the West since Hitler. But Roy knows Islam (and Islamism) inside out. It is a shame that his views did not receive the attention in the United States given to those of Bernard Lewis, whose more belligerent take on Islam helped persuade the Bush administration to invade Iraq.

“Holy Ignorance” extends Roy’s thesis to all forms of fundamentalism, not just those associated with the Muslim world. Consider the Tea Party movement, whose views on both the Constitution and the Bible insist on the wisdom contained in sacred texts. Tea Partiers, while fearful of liberal and secular elites, prefer to concentrate on President Obama’s alleged socialism. That too amounts to ignorance, but it is no longer very holy.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Rhonda Byrne, The Power. Atria Books, 2010.

Reviewed by Mark Vernon

“I must begin each day with a positive thought,” an acquaintance of mine explained, eyes wide. We were sitting in a café over breakfast on a bright autumn morning. “We naturally wake up in sunlight, don’t we? It’s important that the first shimmer of awareness is constructive. Create optimism in your mind and life will go well.” She was quite evangelical.

And she was a convert. She has bought—and bought into—Rhonda Byrne’s latest smash hit, The Power. This book is the follow-up to The Secret, a small, glossy tome that has sold by the wagon-load all over the world. It’s been translated into 46 languages. In The Secret, Byrne ‘revealed’ the law of attraction. Now read The Power, she urges, and you’ll be, well, more empowered.

I was tempted to mock. Surely the second book is just cashing in on the first, in a cynical way demonstrating the law of attraction, which might be partially summarized as ‘success breeds success’? But I stopped myself. For both books are only articulating, if in a simplistic form, an approach to living that has ancient roots. Which is not to say it’s right.

The law of attraction is likened to magnetism. “Everything in the universe is magnetic and everything has a magnetic frequency,” Byrne explains in The Power. Thoughts and feelings have magnetic frequencies too. Hence, what you feel sets your frequency, and so what you will magnetically attract—be that money or poverty, health or illness, good relationships or disasters, and so on.

She describes a methodology. First, imagine yourself having it. Second, feel yourself with it. Third, receive it—for by then the magnetic force of the cosmos will be working through you. If you don’t receive it, that must be because you messed up steps one and two.

Take money. “If you don’t have enough money, naturally you don’t feel good,” Byrne says. But you won’t have money if you keep feeling that way; you’ll only attract more bills and expenses. So feel easy, at peace, and relaxed about money: “that feeling is magnetically sticky.” And that means cash will stick to you too. “One man wrote a check for $100 to a charity,” she cites in a brief case study. “Within ten hours he’d closed his biggest sale.”

Alongside such ‘evidence,’ pseudo-science is rallied to the cause too. For example, Byrne latches onto the ‘tipping point’ phenomenon, interpreting it to mean that if 51% of your thoughts are positive, you’ll attract more and more in an exponential curve—what people colloquially refer to as a lucky streak. There are nods to quantum physics and Werner Heisenberg’s description of the universe as a sea of ‘potentialities.’ No notice, of course, is taken of the massive destructiveness of the quantum world, which is the source of energy for nuclear weapons, and which Heisenberg was also referring to.

Ancient Attitude

Yet Byrne is writing in a tradition that can claim, in part, a long and serious pedigree. In particular, ancient Greek Stoicism bears comparison. Stoicism’s founder was Zeno of Citium, and the story goes that he was shipwrecked off the coast of Athens while delivering a load of porphyry. Zeno loathed the life of the merchant. Ever since his father had started bringing home copies of Plato’s dialogues, he’d longed to make his way to philosophy’s capital city. Now, he had his chance.

Once on land, he abandoned the ship, and made straight for a bookseller. The first book he picked up was a copy of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, a memoir of Socrates written by one of his first followers. Zeno turned to Book Two, in which Socrates discusses how a child should be educated. The sage voices a complaint: children are taught all kinds of things, he notes, but not basic skills like how to withstand pain or nurture happiness. Training in such matters would be useful, Socrates observes. And Zeno agreed.

He focused particularly on how the mental judgements we make in response to the things that happen to us can overwhelm us. For example, a day might be ruined by a trivial disappointment. The good Stoic, though, learns not to let that get him down and, in general, to react well to any eventuality. (Not getting a good deal on your cabbages at the market is one situation discussed; Zeno’s philosophy came to be called Stoicism because he taught in the Stoa, an everyday place of shops, and therefore an excellent place to practice this attitudinal philosophy.)

The Stoics backed up their practical concerns with a complete metaphysics. The cosmos, they believed, was run through and through with a benign force called the logos. Life goes well when we align our thoughts with this all-pervasive current. It sounds like the law of attraction.

Expect Nothing

However, there are critical differences between Stoicism and The Power, for the ancients were wise to life’s tragedies too. Some things do, apparently, go badly. (They could hardly think otherwise, living during that long period of history in which death was associated with the young, not the old.) So, their instruction was to ‘go with the flow’ even when that is hard to stomach. Theirs is not a relentless optimism, expecting everything, like Byrne’s. Rather, the Stoics advocated expecting nothing, but working at everything. Be lightened by life’s absurdities too, they recommended. That way you won’t be disappointed when you don’t, apparently, make progress. You’ll be able to maintain your trust in the logos.

But isn’t there a bigger charge to make against these “mind-cures,” as William James called them more than a century ago? (Books like The Power were bestsellers in Victorian times too.) He reasoned that they succeed ‘in ignoring evil’s very existence.’ Evil is a big thing to ignore, so I have to say that I agree with him. It points to something flawed in the human condition. We have what James called ‘sick souls.’ Do we not do what we wouldn’t do, and don’t do what we would do, as Saint Paul observed?

James opposed mind-cures to what he called ‘twice-born’ religions and philosophies, which teach that life in all its fullness only comes when we’re somehow born again into a state more perfect than this one. In ancient Greek tragedy, only a hero who dies well is reborn in the stars. In Indian philosophy, the karmic echoes of this life are worked out in the next and the next and the next. And in Christianity, it is only those who lose their life who will find it: die daily to yourself, and redemption will come.

The Power, though, and The Secret, need no such savior or sacrifice. It’s certainly an easier sell.

Reviewed by Dan Gilbert

In 1650, Oliver Cromwell asked the Church of Scotland to reconsider its decision to side with the royalists instead of him. “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” The church didn’t think it possible, of course, so Oliver’s army took Scotland.

According to Kathryn Schulz, each of us is our very own Church of Scotland — ­often mistaken, oddly oblivious and typically immune to a good beseeching. ­“Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” is an insightful and delightful discussion of the errors of our ways — why we make mistakes, why we don’t know we are making them and what we do when recognition dawns.

Schulz begins with a question that should puzzle us more than it does: Why do we love being right? After all, she writes, “unlike many of life’s other delights — chocolate, surfing, kissing — it does not enjoy any mainline access to our biochemistry: to our appetites, our adrenal glands, our limbic systems, our swoony hearts.” Indeed, as she notes, “we can’t enjoy kissing just anyone, but we can relish being right about almost anything,” including that which we’d rather be wrong about, like “the downturn in the stock market, say, or the demise of a friend’s relationship or the fact that at our spouse’s insistence, we just spent 15 minutes schlepping our suitcase in exactly the opposite direction from our hotel.”

Schulz teases out answers to this question over two rather different halves of her book. In the first half, she conducts a scientific tour of everyday wrongness that includes optical illusions, memory failures, neurological deficits and irrational beliefs, describing how they arise, how they are perpetuated by those around us and why we find it so difficult to see them for what they are. Much of this territory will be familiar to readers of such recent popular psychology titles as “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)” or “The Invisible Gorilla.” Although Schulz, a journalist, covers this material less expertly than the experts, she compensates by drawing on a wider pool of informants, from Wittgenstein to Hamlet to Alan Greenspan. By the end of the tour, we have a pretty good sense of why we see what isn’t there, believe what isn’t true and remember what didn’t happen.

Schulz then shifts from origins to experience — from “how our senses, our minds and our allegiances can all lead us into ­error” to “how we react when our convictions collapse out from under us, and how we are changed by that experience.” This shift in perspective is accompanied by a sudden shift in form that compels Schulz to pop out of her narrative after 249 ­pages and discuss her plan with the reader. Hearing no objections, she offers several chapters that tell personal stories in classic New Yorker style (“On April 4, 1968, the day that Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, Claiborne Paul Ellis threw a party”). Case histories of a Klansman who became an unlikely advocate for civil rights, of a doomsday prophet whose apocalypse wasn’t now, of a sexual assault victim whose mistaken testimony jailed an innocent man allow Schulz to explore what happens to us when our wrongness is exposed and we must accept it, deny it or be transformed by it. The stories are mainly gripping and always well told, though sometimes more powerful than the points they are meant to illuminate.

From the expository first half through the character-driven second, Schulz remains good company — a warm, witty and welcome presence who confides in her readers rather than lecturing them. It doesn’t hurt that she combines lucid prose with perfect comic timing: “Witness, for instance, the difficulty with which even the well-mannered among us stifle the urge to say ‘I told you so.’ The brilliance of this phrase . . . derives from its admirably compact way of making the point that not only was I right, I was also right about being right. In the instant of uttering it, I become right squared, maybe even right factorial, logarithmically right — at any rate, really, extremely right, and really, extremely delighted about it.”

Schulz is not just a quotable writer; she is also a canny and original observer ­adept at pointing out things that we should have known, but didn’t. For example, she suggests that one reason people are so wildly overconfident in the accuracy of their beliefs is that being wrong has no telltale phenomenology. We know what it feels like to have been wrong in the past, perhaps just seconds ago, but not what it feels like to be wrong in the present, because the instant we realize that what we believe is wrong, we no longer believe it. “It does feel like something to be wrong,” she says. “It feels like being right.” When Schulz suggests that memory and imagination are essentially forms of error — the perception of events that aren’t actually happening — we wonder what she could be thinking, and why we didn’t think of it first.

“Being Wrong” is smart and lively, but not without its faults. Schulz promises what she calls a “wrongology” but never builds the systematic arguments that “­-ology” requires. Instead we get a “wrongologue” — a series of observations and insights that leave us feeling that we’ve had all the good thoughts one could possibly have about wrongness, but that we still don’t know which ones are . . . well, right. Compelling points are not assembled into necessary conclusions, and so her book ends up being the sum of its parts, but not more.

Error, though, is a sweeping subject, and a rigorous wrongology may be too much to ask of anyone. Schulz tells us early on that her goal is “to foster an intimacy with our own fallibility” and to “linger for a while inside the normally elusive and ephemeral experience of being wrong.” These goals she accomplishes with aplomb. For most of us, errors are like cockroaches: we stomp them the moment we see them and then flush the corpse as fast as we can, never pausing to contemplate the intricate design of nature’s great survivor, never asking what it might reveal beyond itself. But Schulz is the patient naturalist who carefully examines the nasty little miracles the rest of us so eagerly discard.

This review originally appeared in the New York Times.