Book Reviewed: Lectures on the Bhagavad Gita by Swami Vivekananda

The wisdom of Bhagavadgita Bhagavadgita is the essence of Vedas that expounds knowledge and remedy the challenges of life. Swami Vivekananda offers a concise interpretation of teaching of Lord Krishna in three consecutive lectures in San Francisco, California. Vivekananda infuse vigor into Hindu thought, placing less emphasis on the prevailing pacifism but more on Hindu spirituality. There are three lectures in this short book of 40 pages. In the first chapter, Vivekananda presents a bird’s eye view of Vedas and what it meant to orthodox and non-orthodox Hindus. But he calls Upanishads equivalent of Bible, which proposes one God (Brahman), and Bhagavadgita as the commentary on the Upanishads. The law of karma gives humans a way out of for happiness, but Vivekananda argues happiness and the concept of heaven are too materialistic in nature. One must go beyond the law of karma and seek unification with Brahman, the Supreme Consciousness. Brahman has no attributes, but it is an entity that encompasses omniscience (infinite knowledge), omnipotence (unlimited power), omnipresence (present everywhere), Omni benevolence (perfect goodness), immutable, divine simplicity, and eternal existence. Brahman’s qualities are personal and impersonal which exists in spaceless and timeless dimensions in an unchanging reality amidst and beyond the realm of a universe. The Pure Consciousness (True Self) can transcend all possible laws of physics, all dimensions, and all physical realities. Swamiji refers to verses in Chapter 2 in which Arjuna request Krishna to guide him on how to overcome his grief at the idea of killing his own family members and teachers. Krishna explains that the cause of all grief is due to ignorance that results from the lack of understanding about the True Self. He explains the Yoga of discipline of selfless action without being attached to its fruits is essential. Vivekananda was known for his prodigious memory and the ability at speed reading. He was responsible for bringing Hinduism to the status of a major world religion and a force in its revival in India and raising interfaith awareness in Western hemisphere. This is one of the numerous lectures Swamiji offered about Gita and the Upanishads during his lifetime.

Book Reviewed: Preacher's Girl: The Life and Crimes of Blanche Taylor Moore by Jim Schutze

Lady from hell The story of Blanche Moore is a Southern-comfort facade of gentility, a fusion of Scarlet O’Hara and Blanche DuBois, hides a murderous revenge on men in her life. Apparently rooted in the sexual abuse from her father when she was a little girl. Blanche is seductively nice and compassionate until she would find her way of finishing them off, literally. Spiking milk shakes, or potato soups or a drink with anti-ant poisoning, she was cold and calculated killer who manipulated the men she was intimate with. The motive was for financial gain or a plain revenge. She poisoned three men in her life; her first husband, a co-worker, Raymond Reid with whom she worked with, and her second husband, a preacher who survived despite intense arsenic poisoning. She may also be responsible for her father’s death, and her mother-in-law by her first marriage. Currently Blanche Moore is awaiting execution in the state of North Carolina for the 1986 killing of her boyfriend, Raymond Reid. The 1993 movie “Black Widow Murders: The Blanche Taylor Moore Story” starring Elizabeth Montgomery offered a brilliant performance as sweet-talking cold faced killer. In fact, much of the movie is based on the research work of author Jim Schutze. It saves you great deal of time to watch the movie than read the book. In addition, it saves you from reading the ghastly details of pain and sufferings of arsenic poisoning.

Book Reviewed: Everybody's Doin' It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 by Dale Cockrell

Boogie Nights: Domestic Revolution in 19th century New York Author Dale Cockrell focuses on music and popular dance forms to narrate the social history of Manhattan in the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century. It is a historical study of popular music and dance that identifies a connection between uninhibited sex and dancing which included gay sex, orgies, and interracial sex. These were widely promoted in Manhattan bars, brothels, and dance halls where sale of sex for cash was endemic. Social dancing was one of the ways that sex and music were linked. This book looks at race, class, popular culture, and sexuality, which includes the centrality of African-American musical culture, the sexual attitudes and behavior of working-class Americans, and the anti-vice crusaders like Anthony Comstock, Rev. Charles Parkhurst, and others who paved the way for urban Anti-Vice Commissions of the early twentieth-century that targeted these gathering places that facilitated inter-racial socializing which were believed to be inherently immoral. When Charles Dickens visited the United States in 1842, he visited several bars in the Five Points area of Manhattan, just east of today’s Centre Street & north of Worth Street, a neighborhood which at the time had both large black and Irish populations. Tap dancing was invented here by combining Irish step-dancing and African rhythmic patterns. Another account of musical life by journalist George Goodrich Foster gives an even more vivid picture of the musical and sexual atmosphere. The author tries to correlate these anecdotes to illustrate how musical exuberance, dancing and sexual acts occurred. The 1987 movie Dirty Dancing, starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey exploited a cultural banality of people’s feeling about dancing and sex. Boogie Nights, the 1997 film about a young nightclub dishwasher who becomes a porn star ties the cultural myth about dancing halls and sex. The Argentine tango, a musical genre and accompanying social dance originating at the end of the 19th century in the brothels of Buenos Aires around the same time as the emergence of ragtime in New York. The author points out that ragtime, a new musical, and dance form was composed by black musicians, to be played in dance halls and brothels was rarely written down but it is the first identifiable style of jazz. Many of these places were multi-racial venues, known also as “black and tans” which the vice crusaders campaigned against. This devastated the City’s nightlife and undermined many of its musical venues. It targeted black-run clubs to racially divide the social life. Everybody’s Doin’ It is a follow-up from Cockrell’s previous book, Demons of Disorder. This book integrates the history of working-class culture and openness of sexuality in New York. The author is musicologist and not a social historian. He traces the birth of jazz music in the dance halls and dives of New York City, but the book chapters do not flow well from one to another, and images and illustrations shown in this book has white folks in the dance hall and never shows a mixed gatherings of blacks and whites.