BOOKS
Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
By Deepak
Chopra
(Harmony Books)
Physician-turned-alternative-medicine-guru Deepak Chopra has a talent for explaining the rich, spiritual soup of India’s ancient culture to Westerners. Although trained in Western medicine, he rejects the materialism of its science. Taking up where he left off in How to Know God, his theme in Life After Death is consciousness and the afterlife.
Chopra finds much in other religions that resonates with the Vedanta, the body of wisdom passed down by the sages, or rishis, of the ancient Vedic era. But he also gently tweaks traditional views held by some Christians, whose conventional ideas of heaven strike him as “eternal assisted living,” and their literal belief in Bible myths, he writes, “says a great deal about our refusal to take responsibility for the afterlife.”
Since birth isn’t our beginning, neither is death our ending, Chopra asserts. The heaven, hell or other place we may find ourselves after death depends on what we expect to find. A good Muslim, for example, won’t go to a Christian heaven, but to an Islamic one, and vice-versa. Likewise, he says, if you go to the bad place, “Hell is the suffering you think you deserve.”
Life After Death is framed by the Indian tale of Savitri, a woman who undertakes a journey to outwit Death. As her guide cautions her, “You mustn’t buy a truth secondhand. Find the I am inside yourself.”
If self-exploration is indeed the best preparation for the afterlife, this book from Chopra is a good place to start. Whether or not readers find the promised “proof,” they will come away pondering the twin miracles of life and death.
—Jaye Christensen
Peace Mom: A Mother’s Journey through Heartache to Activism
By Cindy Sheehan
(Atria Books)
To protest the war in Iraq that killed her son, Casey, Cindy Sheehan camped outside Pres. Bush’s house in Texas for months. Peace Mom recounts her passionate journey from homemaker to antiwar activist.
The book is organized more or less chronologically, beginning with Casey’s birth and finishing with the results of Sheehan’s time at Camp Casey. But within each chapter, the author jumps from past to present, or from narrative to exposition. It’s part autobiography, part persuasive essay, part refutation against her attackers and part angry tirade. Powerful as her story is, such stylistic jumping sometimes makes the book feel scattered and redundant.
But it’s possible that leaving the text a bit raw was an editorial choice. Sheehan’s tone is conversational and accessible, and her emotion is palpable. The flaws in the writing make her seem normal and human, as if to say: “This isn’t some polished story created by the anti-war propaganda machine. It’s me, or you, writing about living through the most horrible experience imaginable.”
It’s unlikely this book will change the minds of anyone on the other side of the fence, but it will certainly be a valuable resource for other mothers like Sheehan — especially those who already oppose, or are beginning to question, the war. And for someone like me, untouched by the war in an immediate sense but certainly aware of Camp Casey, it’s a fascinating explanation of how this regular woman went from housewife to household name.
—Molly Freedenberg
MUSIC
Sierra Leone’s Refugee All-Stars
Living Like A Refugee
(Anti)
It’s a war-torn world we live in, and rarely do hopeful stories arise from the ashes, but that’s just what Sierra Leone’s Refugee All-Stars give us. The group formed in a Guinean refugee camp after its members—many of them professional musicians from Freetown—were forced to flee the fighting in their native Sierra Leone. Their stories could break your heart—before escaping, they saw parents, wives, even their own children killed. Armed with a few guitars and a beat-up sound system some Canadian aid workers scared up, the group turned to music to heal their wounds and ease the suffering of fellow refugees.
Nobody—not even the Americans who followed the group and made a documentary about them—could have predicted their appeal. Marrying Sierra Leone’s palm wine music, or “maringa,” to reggae and highlife, the band transforms almost unspeakable tragedy into wry, witty and delicately beautiful songs that reference Bob Marley as easily as West African pop.
On the opening track, in understatement intended as humor, the singer croons the words, “Living like a refugee/Is not easy.” But the hard reality of their circumstances shines through as well, including in touches as basic as the instrumentation: several songs feature live crickets chirping in the background, and with only guitars at their disposal, the members resort to vocally imitating missing instruments.
Charming and heartbreaking, joyful and bittersweet, this album will sneak into your heart before you know it, stunning you with a joie de vivre that defies all logic and circumstance—and has oceans to teach us about the resilience of the human spirit.
—Sarah Bardeen
For streaming sound clips and info on the documentary, visit refugeeallstars.org
Dan Bern
Breathe
(Messenger)
Running his guitar through a reverberating junkshop amp, Dan Bern chimes a sadly buoyant riff that rolls in second gear as his smart, politically-injected lyrics ka-chung, squee-up and rattle along like the American Dream itself across his latest album’s 10 tracks.
Breathe serves as a follow-up to My Country II, the singer/songwriter’s fall, 2004 EP that tarred and feathered our neocon administration for 23 minutes, and reminded all of us that “liberals” are Americans too, before the election-year release faded out with the hopeful chant, “Bush must be defeated.”
The new album’s opening cut (“Trudy”) is a perfect segue, probably written the night the returns came in with Bush the “winner” again. Where Bern sings stanzas like, “They’re all marching to Pretoria but my dear/The Colts are on TV/And I guess we’ll have to see/How it goes, how it is/In the Christian New Year…”
Breathe returns Bern’s pen to its wider scope, sketching cotton-y cumulous clouds in poison ink on pop/folk-rock tunes that muse on the environment, masculinity, truth and — on the album’s radio hit ballad (“Remember Me”) — even the monomania of true love.
Longtime fans will be pleased that his obsession with the return of the Messiah (he’s made a series of songs with this premise) rears its always-good-for-a-track-ness on the title cut, where he sings, “The blind came to me and I made ‘em see/Got the deaf diggin’ hi-fidelity/Card tricks, I could do card tricks you wouldn’t believe...”
Later on the cut, Bern (as the Messiah returned), admits that poverty, war, pain are all getting worse, that the oceans are heating up, that the cars are getting bigger, and from the Mount, implores everyone to stop what they’re doing — “eatin’ hamburgers, corporate mergers, honkin’ your horn, Internet porn” — and …breathe.
“Saving” music one album at a time, this Dylan-voiced Jesus Christ-meets-Woody Guthrie-meets-Gen X wise-ass-from-Iowa is just what a good liberal American needs to help ride things out until the 2008 election.
—Todd Spencer
FILM/DVD
Simple Steps to a Greener Home
By Danny Seo
(Gaiam)
Reaffirming his role as a Martha Stewart for the treehugger set, green living expert Danny Seo presents a new DVD guide to creating an eco-chic living space. In Simple Steps to a Greener Home, Seo touches on everything from solar power to micro-fiber mops, offering easily digestible tips ideal for anyone looking to move or makeover a current abode.
Despite his Pennsylvania roots, the 29-year-old Conscious Style Home author speaks with all the bubbly breeziness of a native Southern Californian, an effect that—along with comfy-casual wardrobe choices like grey hoodies and jeans—works to assure us that we’re getting our green guidance from someone undeniably hip.
But throughout, Seo backs up his style savvy with a serious knowledge of how household products and everyday practices can have an impact on the planet, introducing viewers to the pleasures of composting and the dangers of using paints high in volatile organic compounds. For an added element of expert advice, Seo turns to on-site interviews with eco-pioneers helping to green the mainstream, including the manufacturers of recycled-material countertops and a pair of designers who fashion furniture solely from scraps discarded by the woodworking industry.
Still, Simple Steps to a Greener Home’s most fun moments—and some of its most practical advice—come when Seo gets crafty. Whether showing how to whip up an at-home spa treatment from used coffee grounds or instructing us to add vanilla extract to paint to get a sweeter scent, Seo more than fulfills the DVD’s promise that “simply green can indeed be gorgeous.”
—Elizabeth Barker
To order the DVD, visit gaiam.com
Hanging with The Sloth
Directed by Jeri Ledbetter
“With less than 50 percent of the muscle mass one would expect for a creature its size, the sloth is physically incapable of rapid movement,” says Jeri Ledbetter, director of the new nature documentary Hanging with The Sloth, shot in Costa Rica and Panama. The environmentalist, pilot and Grand Canyon river guide is also a remarkable filmmaker. Of course she will be the first to admit that the sloths featured in her footage get a lot of the credit, just for being so darn endearing and inspiring. And bizarre.
As we learn in the 30-minute documentary, sloths live in the canopies of rainforests, eating leaves and conserving energy by sleeping up to 18 hours a day (five more hours/day than cats). In the morning they climb to the top of their trees to soak up the sun like furry solar panels. The bitchin’ rays are not just for the sloth, though, but also for the ecosystems of beetles and algae that live in their coats.
Sloth’s low-energy, symbiotic, nonviolent lifestyles along with their permanent smiles, meditative calmness and slow, deliberate movements are making it a growing symbol for ecological and social consciousness. Making them even more compelling, we learn, is the fact that if attacked, their tough hides, tenacious grips and extraordinary ability to heal from terrible wounds often saves them. They’re like love tanks! And if you think kittens and puppies are cute, wait ’til you see a two-week-old two-toed sloth! Omigod.
Sloths are indeed slow and laborious movers on the ground. French naturalist Georges Buffon pompously described them in 1772 as “the lowest form of existence. One more defect would have made their existence entirely impossible.” But, as Ledbetter shows, they are highly adapted to life in the limbs and, strangely, the water, where they are “strong and gracious swimmers.” All the while gliding through the rivers, streams and lakes of Central and South America with that permanent grin on their faces.
—Todd Spencer
To order the DVD, visit choicesvideo.net