Amazon.com Review
If you've ever felt the truth arise within you while sitting beside a quiet stream or lingering under a sky full of stars, you know what it's like to read Satish Kumar's autobiography
Path Without Destination. Kumar left home at the age of nine to become a wandering Jain monk and has never stopped wandering. His political consciousness began with a Gandhi-inspired walk from India to Britain and two principles: eat no meat and carry no money. This lifestyle of simplicity and nonviolent political activity has carried Kumar through endeavors as diverse as participating in land reform activism in the Indian countryside, founding the London School of Nonviolence, serving as editor of the international magazine
Resurgence, taking part in activism for rural education in the U.K., and making another pilgrimage--a religious one around England. Kumar's is the story of another kind of success, one of gentle truth and justice achieved with no resources other than an unwavering core of spirituality. Page after languid page, that spirituality seeps into his readers' being.
--Brian Bruya
From Publishers Weekly
For Kumar, the enemy is the global economy, mass production and multinational corporations, which lead to alienating work and extremes of poverty and wealth. His ideal world is a loose confederation of self-reliant, frugal, ecological communities and bioregions practicing small-scale local production. If that sounds like a page from E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful, it's no accident. Kumar, a former Jain monk born in India in 1936, was a close associate of Schumacher in London in the mid-1970s and, after the latter's death, founded the Schumacher Society to promote a decentralized, low-tech, egalitarian civilization. In this spiritual autobiography, he renders these ideas powerful by virtue of the example of his own commitment to them. In 1962, with a mixture of lofty idealism and personal callousness, Kumar left his new wife and their three-week-old daughter in India and, with a fellow activist, set off on a two-year, round-the-world walk, stopping in Moscow, Paris, London and Washington to urge government leaders to abolish nuclear weapons and end the arms race. His "peace pilgrimage" makes for an incredible road adventure, but the book later threatens to become one long, exhausting itinerary as he re-creates trips to Japan, Tibet, Nepal and his four-month pilgrimage on foot in 1985 to Britain's sacred sites and alternative communities. Many will view Kumar's prescriptions as fantasy, but none can doubt that these pages are animated by a fierce integrity. Agent, Andrew Blauner.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
