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Book Reviews 
Comments and Blurbs about Crooked Cucumber
Crooked Cucumber main page

2nd edition page

Comments on Reviews  including the intro and link to the Negative Blurb Page.


[Additional reviews will be added from time to time. The next to come are the  the Daily Yomiuri  in Japan, the Santa Fe Reporter, and the Washington Post/International Herald Tribune, and the Pacific Sun.] - lord - that was years ago and I still haven't done it. Oh well, someday. No time today to do more than add the Spirituality one. - DC 2-26-07


Crooked Cucumber is listed by Pema Chodron (Buddhist teacher and author) as one of the ten most important spiritual books of the twentieth century.
--Shambala Sun (Sept. '99)

Amazon.com picked Crooked Cucumber as #3 on its 
1999 list of Best Books on Eastern Religion


QUOTES about CROOKED CUCUMBER

Lou [Hartman] also read to me the entire volume called Crooked Cucumber, which is the life and times of Suzuki Roshi. It was very funny and very interesting. All the trials and tribulations that that fella went through to get to where he was was something else. - Philip Whalen, from an interview by David Meltzer 

"Chadwick laces the facts of Suzuki's life with relevant fragments from his teachings, but the genius of his book lies in the way in which at every point he lets revealing anecdotes carry the story line. The result is a biography that brings his wise and lovable teacher to life to an extent I would not have believed the printed word could. Chadwick has produced a remarkable biography of a truly remarkable man."
-Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions

"It's impossible to imagine a better book than this about Suzuki Roshi. Crooked Cucumber  possesses the virtues of its subject--straight forward, without excess, without deficiency, without pomp or falseness, it's a precise picture of Suzuki's values, hopes and problems could make it a major primer of Zen itself."
-Robert Pirsig, author of Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

"This book is a touching account of Suzuki-roshi's life, full of funny stories, brave and generous."
-- Robert Bly, poet and author of Iron John and The Sibling Society

"Crooked Cucumber is a moving and eloquent biography of that quiet man who, with Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, was to become the most widely revered Zen teacher in this country. Conveying his spirit lovingly and well, it becomes in itself a wonderful manifestation of his gentle teachings.
-Peter Matthiessen, author of At Play in the Fields of the Lord , The Snow Leopard

"Like a pebble dropped into a still pond with ever-widening waves of resonance, here is the arc of a life unfolding across civilizations and centuries of Buddhist practice to bring the way of Zen into the everyday lives of a generation of American seekers. Shunryu Suzuki taught by example, extraordinary in its ordinariness, leaving no trace except the transparent wisdom and lucent joy of living in a world with nothing to hold on to and everything to share. What bred this kind of awareness in action? From his childhood in the family of a parish priest in a rural Zen temple, his years as a young monk and scholar, and his work as a priest in Japan in war and peace, this book yields the intimate feel and texture of a life in the making, complicate in its time and place yet lit by the inner curiosity of a pilgrim to be. In San Francisco in the 1960s the surprising, surefooted genius of a veteran Zen master, delighted to begin anew, comes into flower and bears fruit. Here is the drama of Beat Zen and Hip Zen, desperados and dreamers, matrons and maniacs discovering what it means to sit down on a meditation cushion, come to your senses, and come of age. Here, too, is the difficult adventure of discipleship and institution-building that gave birth to San Francisco Zen Center; and the agonic, loving lesson of a good teacher dying a good death, just as he lived, on the middle path embracing form and emptiness, history and moment, word and breath."
-Steven Tipton, co-author of Habits of the Heart, The Good Society, and author of Getting Saved from the Sixties.


  Doug Luskatof - sp? - Suzuki student comments


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