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When Dinty Moore was fifteen and on a Catholic Youth retreat weekend at a monastery in upstate New York, he thought for a brief moment he might grow up to be a priest. Instead, over the years, he lost his faith. "Twenty-five years later, I found myself at the doorway of a different monastery," Moore writes. " And the monks? Well, this time the monks were Buddhists."
The Accidental Buddhist is the funny, provocative story of how Dinty Moore, as American as Huckleberry Finn, went looking for the faith he'd lost in what might seem the most unlikely of places: the ancient Eastern tradition of Buddhism. Like George Plimpton venturing into the world of professional sports, Dinty Moore enters the retreat centers, zendos, and meditation halls that have been taking root in every corner of America.
Moore takes the time to see what Buddhism has to offer the harried, hassled American of the new century. He explores the different varieties of American Buddhism, attends rallies, even tracks down and questions the Dalai Lama. In the process, much to his own surprise, he finds himself fascinated and moved by what he encounters.
For anyone who has wondered about the gorwing visibility of Buddhism, Dinty Moore demystifies and explains the contradictions and concepts of this most mystic-seeming of religious traditions, while putting it into an American context. Those already interested in Buddhism will find The Accidental Buddhist a plain-spoken, insightful look at the dharma in America.
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This introduction to creative nonfiction illustrates the influence of individual voice and narrative strategies on nonfiction prose. Essays from contemporary nonfiction writers such as Henry Louis Gates, Norma Elia Cantú, Pico Iyer, Joan Didion, and others are integrated directly into the text to illustrate concepts. Individual chapters are devoted to detail and description, characterization and scene, distinctive voice, intimate point-of-view, and the various ways in which writers discover the significance or universality of their work. For writers wanting to explore creative nonfiction. ...
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“Insouciant” and “irreverent” are the sort of words that come up in reviews of Dinty W. Moore’s books—and, invariably, “hilarious.” Between Panic and Desire, named after two towns in Pennsylvania, finds Moore at the top of his astutely funny form. A book that could be named after one of its chapters, “A Post-Nixon, Post-panic, Post-modern, Post-mortem,” this collection is an unconventional memoir of one man and his culture, which also happens to be our own. Blending narrative and quizzes, memory and numerology, and imagined interviews and conversations with dead presidents on TV, the book dizzily documents the disorienting experience of growing up in a postmodern world. Here we see how the major events in the author’s early life—the Kennedy assassination, Nixon’s resignation, watching Father Knows Best, and dropping acid atop the World Trade Center, to name a few—shaped the way he sees events both global and personal today. More to the point, we see how these events shaped, and possibly even distorted, today’s world for all of us who spent our formative years in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. A curious meditation on family and bereavement, longing and fear, self-loathing and desire, Between Panic and Desire unfolds in kaleidoscopic forms—a coroner’s report, a TV movie script, a Zen koan—aptly reflecting the emergence of a fractured virtual America. (20071210)...
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