By Stephen T. Asma, Ph.D.
[Hampton Roads Publishing, 2009. 162 pages, $15.95 paperback]
Reviewed by Micki Leventhal

Stephen Asma is Columbia’s first Distinguished Scholar and a popular teacher of philosophy and other humanities. He is also an accomplished artist, a mean blues guitarist, and a prolific writer. Like its author, Buddha for Beginners is hard to pigeonhole. Created in the style of a graphic novel, it incorporates sometimes-biting humor with satiric illustrations to both archly critique “new age spirituality” and lucidly explain the core teachings of the Buddha. This revised edition further clarifies the dharma (teachings). Asma contends these ideas are deeply and seriously misunderstood in the West.

In accessible language, Asma recounts the story of the historical Buddha, examines the religious roots of Buddhism, and explains its different cultural and regional manifestations. He importantly contrasts and compares Buddhist philosophy with Hinduism—a religion with which Buddhism is often conflated—and outlines the differences between Theravadan Buddhism and later Mahayana Buddhism (which includes the Zen and Tibetan sects).

Asma tackles some of the most challenging metaphysical knots in the dharma—including reincarnation, karma, the five hindrances, the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the nature of nirvana, and the concept of no-self—in clear, jargon-free language. This is an excellent introduction for beginners and a delightful refresher for the dedicated student or practitioner, serving perhaps to challenge some cherished beliefs. Be warned, however: never one to mince words, Asma takes some potshots at selected schools of Buddhist thought, and there are practitioners out there who will be offended.

Stephen T. Asma is the author of The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha (HarperCollins, 2005), Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums (Oxford University Press, 2001), and the forthcoming On Monsters: A Tour of Fears and Fascinations (Oxford). Visit stephenasma.com.

By Brandi Homan (M.F.A. ’07)
[Shearsman Books, 2008.
95 pages, $15 paperback]
Reviewed by Elizabeth Burke-Dain

In her first collection of poems, Hard Reds, Brandi Homan paints a clear portrait of the woman behind the words: part biker chick, part philosopher, part witch doctor. Her poetry is a mixture of avant-garde contemplations and heartsick country music. In the first poem, “Explaining Poetry on a First Date,” the narrator tries justifying poetry to a suitor who won’t get it, not because of a refusal to understand, but because poetic understanding is what Homan describes as “affliction not religion. / Not once have I thought I could be saved.”

The book is broken up into three sections: “Like the Devil,” “Two Kinds of Arson,” and “The Valentine Factory.” The color red figures into almost all of the poems. It represents the devil, sexuality, and violence—often all at the same time. Homan unleashes demons with a turn of phrase, eats their flesh, and then salves their wounds with balms and ointments. In the poem “Country Songs Always Tell Stories,” she alludes to the tragic story of Lennie in Of Mice and Men:

I’ve always felt sorry for Lennie and giants
and you, little bull with the thousand china
cuts I would lick shut .…
.… Your cuts will close,
I promise, but you will snap
my neck.

The poem “Meditations on a Ball Bearing” is something of a departure from the fabulous vampiric drama of the other pieces. It’s a meditation and a metaphor for the sympathetic ache of life:

Things roll better than
They slide. Slick as conceit
And shiny as conscience
In your weaned casing,
Whenever I watch you
I ache everywhere soft.

Homan’s wonderful poems say many things, and one of her messages might just be that love will kill you—but not on purpose.

Brandi Homan is editor-in-chief of Switchback Books, a feminist poetry press. She earned her M.F.A. from Columbia College Chicago and her M.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Homan writes professionally in advertising. Her chapbook, Two Kinds of Arson, is available from dancing girl press.

By Joe Meno (B.A. ’97, M.F.A. ’00)
[Akashic Books, 2008.
272 pages, $24.95 hardcover]
Reviewed by Chay Lawrence

The thing that strikes you first about Demons in the Spring: it’s a pretty book that would look really nice on your coffee table. Luckily, Joe Meno has provided 20 of his short stories to fill the yawning white expanse between the embossed cloth cover and the color illustrations contained therein. Demons in the Spring continues in the vein of Meno’s past short fiction, where brutal situations bump shoulders with magical realism, often within the same story.

Meno’s work embodies the millennial condition in which 50 percent of the U.S. population will, at some point in their lives, develop a form of mental illness. The other half, of course, must suffer the heartache of being close to the former. Hence, these detours into the realms of the fantastic are not just quirky asides, they’re simply addressing the half of the readership who, at one point or another, have inhabited these strange shores. In what is perhaps the centerpiece of the collection, “The Unabomber and My Brother,” the narrator compares the life of Theodore Kaczynski with that of his own elder brother, once a bullying jock now succumbing to the unraveling of his own mind: one raging against the dehumanizing effects of life in a postindustrial society, the other falling victim to it.

Meno’s protagonists live out lives at the end of their tethers, quiet and imbalanced, as the world around them unravels. In “The Architecture of the Moon,” a son tries his best to make maps for his father, who gets lost returning from work after the city is bathed in darkness when the moon and stars fail to shine. Often the characters’ only solace is through medication, and the consequences of unchecked neuroses lead to bizarre phenomena: one character turns into a cloud when excited; another develops a “tumor with the properties of a city.” This knack of imbuing the darkest narrative with brief glimpses into a magical netherworld recalls the kitchen-sink fantasies of Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

Joe Meno is the best-selling author of the novels Hairstyles of the Damned, The Boy Detective Fails, How the Hula Girl Sings, and Tender as Hellfire, as well as the short-story collection Bluebirds Used to Sing in the Choir. He teaches creative writing at Columbia.

Alamo + Costello
[Dark Lark Press, 2008. 111 pages, $55.00 hardcover]
Reviewed by Kevin Riordan

This lovingly executed book is something of a genre bender, even as arty visual books go. The spare, snappy design and stand-out production values put it in the territory of a fine art monograph; but the artist, one man with a mathematically hyphenated name, is revealing more than his own photographic work. Bookended between an informal introduction by the author that invites a personal approach and a critical afterword by Robert Kotchen that intelligently parses nuanced significance from nearly every image and its sequencing, the work overflows with a century of everyday life.

Simply, GrandpaDanny is a visual tribute to the artist’s grandfather and his hardworking life as a war veteran, forge worker, and family man. Beyond the essays and thorough catalog of descriptions, the images teem with open-ended possibilities and pretty well cover the respectable uses of photography.

There are four sections: “Family Album” contains perfectly replicated postcards, scrapbook pages, news clippings, and photos that will make you cherish your own such material; “Snaps” comes even closer to bringing the viewer into this vintage world; “Recent Views” introduces the author’s own sensitive camerawork, placing him securely amid the great contemporary shooters that Columbia College seems to mint; and “Artifacts & Relics” catalogs the contents of Danny’s desk and workbench in a way that makes the book itself feel like a tool for remembering. Published by Dark Lark Press, and seemingly the only book with that imprint, this might be called vanity publishing if it weren’t so utterly free of that vice. Pride, yes; vanity, no.

It’s an Indiana thing, this rock-ribbed practicality, showing what anyone with a good eye and a grandfather or two could do if they put their mind, heart, and back into commemorating an exemplary, ordinary life.

Michael Christopher “Chester” Alamo + Costello earned an M.F.A. in photography at Columbia in 1998. He teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois.