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Sunday Reading: The book The New York Times launched into ‘risky’ territory is reviewed by The New York Times

in YD News

We’ve posted a few early reviews by the yoga community, and last week YD contributor Roseanne from It’s All Yoga, Baby interviewed author William J Broad about his shri-stirring book The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards.

The New York Times sent us in to a tizzy with the ‘risk’ section a few weeks back, resulting in a resounding response from yoga teachers and practitioners across the board. Finally, we are given the official NYT book review by fellow Simon and Schuster-published author Annie Murphy Paul, that frames Broad’s “dogged pursuit of the truth about yoga” to “excavate its remarkable history” landing at an “ambiguous, or at least ambivalent” conclusion.

Broad details the recent growth of the “yoga industrial complex,” the big business of selling books, magazines, DVDs, clothes and the mats that seem to inhabit every tote bag carried in brownstone Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side.

Appropriately, yoga seems to have come full circle: flush with cash and focused on perfecting the body, modern yoga has returned to its earthy origins in money and sex. Not that Broad traces anything so neat as a circle. True to his open-minded orientation, he resists ­final summations, leaving ample room for ­yoga’s next ­self-transformation.

Read the rest here.

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5 comments… add one
  • Chris

    Patanjali already wrote the book on Yoga !

    Enough said !

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