Reviews
West of Jesus - Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief
by Steven Kotler / Bloomsbury USA / $13.95
West of Jesus - Surfing, Science and the Origin of Belief starts out in September of 2000 when writer Steven Kotler was living in Los Angeles and was diagnosed with Lyme disease. After all medical help failed him, Kotler was considering suicide. Then a friend called him and invited him to go surfing. He accepted, and his friend took him to Sunset Beach, California. There, something unexpected happened. “For the first time in nearly two years, and just for one wave-riding instant, I felt the thrum of life, the possibility of possibility, and maybe that was enough,” says Kotler. After five waves, Kotler was exhausted and it took him fifteen days to recover; but he kept going back out in the surf and slowly, he was healed. In his words—“surfing saved my life.” A pragmatist, the healed author also realized that a surf-cure sounded a little ridiculous. The quest for Kotler, a non-religious person coming from a Jewish family, was to explain how he was healed. Taking off from this introduction, Kotler surfs the sea of belief and aims to demonstrate a connection between surfing, scientific fact and spirituality. The ocean is Kotler’s cathedral and surfing a religious ritual of connection. As he demonstrates, it is also a dynamic opportunity for meditation and being “in the moment.” West of Jesus enlightens the reader on how a person can be healed when he or she loses, if only for a few seconds, their sense of ego, and is able to regain the joy of life. The spiritual search, in Kotler’s case, is not oriented so much toward finding God but toward elucidating experience. If you are looking to read a scientific essay, then this is not the book for you. If you are itching for straight personal memoir, you may want to check out something else. However, if you are into surfing all the fields of knowledge that connect beliefs, spirituality, science and medicine within a unique and entertaining framework, then this is one you will surely enjoy.
www.bloomsburyusa.com, www.amazon.com -PG
The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery and Invention Inner Traditions / $29.95
“One of the greatest untold secrets of history is that the ‘modern world’ in which we live is a unique synthesis of Chinese and Western ingredients,” states Robert Temple, a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Bejing, in the introduction to his new book, The Genius of China. With this introduction, the basis is set for an exploration of one hundred Chinese “firsts” in the areas of agriculture, astronomy, engineering, mathematics, medicine, music, technology and warfare. Did you know that the Chinese began growing crops in rows and hoeing them thoroughly by at least the sixth century B.C., a good 2,200 years before the practice started in the West? Or that they were the first to invent the stirrup, the fishing rod, the parachute, the seismograph, the tuned drum and the miniature hot air balloon? What about the fact that the Chinese were the first to discover the First Law of Motion (traditionally thought to be discovered by Sir Isaac Newton), spontaneous combustion and modern geology? According to Temple, whose book is based on the work of the world’s most famous Sinologist, Joseph Needham (1900-1995), these discoveries and more had a direct affect on European technological advances and helped pave the way for the agricultural and industrial revolutions in Europe. Besides being a plethora of interesting and detailed information about these discoveries, Temple’s book is also a fun read. It contains pages of glossy, color illustrations and the information is organized into subjects of discovery for easy access to specific information. The Genius of China has been translated into forty-three languages and its Chinese edition, The Spirit of Chinese Invention, was approved by the Chinese Ministry of Education for use with the secondary education curriculum in that country. The Genius of China is a must-have for history buffs and anyone who is interested in the rich and diverse contributions of ancient China to the modern world.—NLP www.innertraditions.com