The Half Known Life

What’s it about?

This book is part travel story , part memoir, and part essays on spirituality.

What did it make me think about?

How can a publisher miss this?

Should I read it?

I can not adequately review this book.

My early impression was that I may not have enough background knowledge to appreciate all the insights in Mr. Iyers’ essays.  The essays were deep and interesting- but I would have gotten more out of them if I had a more base knowledge. The essays were also somewhat disconnected and that made the book seem choppy to me.

But the main reason I had trouble with this book was that the publisher had accidentally spliced in (at different intervals)  pages from Ralph Maccio’s memoir.  So I would be reading about a spiritual practice in Jerusalem and the following page would be talking about Cobra Kai.  Very disconcerting.  It happened in several places in the middle part of the book and it just threw me off.

Had to add the evidence- it was just so unusual!  So my reading experience with his book left me unable to give a review.  Be sure to check your pages if you pick it up!

Quote-

“Not only could we hope to know next to nothing, but our lives would be determined, perhaps, by what we did with all we didn’t know.  It reminded me a little of how the searching Cistercian monk Thomas Merton regularly confessed in his letters that the only faith he could trust would be the one that came to him not as an answer but as a probably unanswerable question.”