About ten years ago, when I was in the Army, I found this book (in the Stars and Stripes bookstore of all places) and promptly fell in love with it. To be brief, it is the fictional account of a brain surgeon who falls victim to brain damage (in the form of a tumor). The book narrates (from the perspective of apparent sanity--one is led to suppose that the narrator overcame his ailment) the gradual mental collapse of a highly intelligent physician who is quite aware what is happening to him but is only intermittently able to do anything about it. To make matters worse, his insanity takes the form of a kind of sporadic allegiance to his own disease, a revolutionary fervor that leads him to reject the "tyranny" of his brain in favor of the cancerous cells rebelling against it. The result is a kind of Moebius strip, a story with no stable foundation, a narrative that proceeds in a series of self-devouring cognitive maneuvers worthy of Samuel Beckett: no evaluative judgement of the apparently insightful narrator can be trusted, since any such judgement is apt to dissolve and reform very convincingly into its antithesis at any moment. Shainberg brilliantly mocks standard assumptions about sanity, health, and "normality," provides many marvelous examples of satire and fine writing along the way (e.g., the devastatingly funny portrait of the phony guru Sensei, who interprets the narrator's disease as enlightenment), and manages to build the tension relentlessly until the novel's grotesque and shocking conclusion.

In short, the book is a small masterpiece. Naturally I looked for others by Shainberg, but he seems to have written very little--the only thing I found by him was a book called "Brain Surgeon," which was good but pedestrian compared to his foray into fiction.

I picked up Ambivalent Zen while my husband was in the midst of reading it and ended up stealing it from him until I had finished it. While I have only a passing interest in Buddhism, I was drawn into this book by his description of his relationship with his father, a somewhat angry, depressed man prone to embracing different philosophies as a cure-all. He is the one who first exposes Shainberg to Zen. This relationship frames the book, which is about Larry Shainberg's exploration of Zen Buddhism. The pace slows midway through, but his interesting use of time serves to keep it moving. Shainberg intersperses segments of his teenage years, with when he first seriously starts meditation "sitting" as a young man, and then as an older adult.

I felt he could have explored more the cultish aspects of some of his experiences, for example when he was living in a community Zen center. He lays it out objectively, but he doesn't come out and tell us his emotions. Did he feel like he was in a cult? Did he feel taken advantage of? Perhaps this is because he didn't want to sound too bitter, but it sounds too careful, too thought out.

One of several books about Zen which I read before actually experiencing Zen meditation, this book stands out as one of the best in communicating the stops, starts, mistakes and rewards of a spiritual quest. The author begins as a secular Jew whose father was a spiritual seeker and who constantly exposed the family to new gurus during the mid-20th Century -- often to comical effect. Eventually the author decides to give Zen Buddhism the old college try, and his experiences are funny, insightful as he gives a fair picture of studying with several different teachers. After he develops a friendship with one teacher in Greenwich Vilage, the author relates many conversations in which the Zen master, with humor and equanimity, tries to untangle his student's anxieties and delusions.

Once I actually began practicing Zen meditation, I felt this book, more than most others, provided a well-balanaced picture of what it's really like to approach and try to practice Zen.

"Ambivalent Zen" provides few answers to life's mysteries. But it has plenty of fun exploring them. Shainberg pulls double-duty as a captivating storyteller and an authority on Zen in this often humorous, sometimes illuminating and always enjoyable book. Shainberg is brutally honest about his trek along the Dharma path. He shares his joys, doubts, confusion, anger and insights with readers, which makes his book all the more compelling. And adding to that are the colorful characters in the book -- from Shainberg's father to his friends and especially his final Zen instructor, Kyudo Roshi. "Ambivalent Zen" is full of first-hand knowledge on the practice of Zen and the search for spiritual enlightenment -- and the contradictions and frustrations encountered by those on that path. Zen practitioners will surely be able to relate to many of Shainberg's adventures. Even those will little interest in Zen will likely find this book to be an enthralling page-turner that reads much more like a memoir than a textbook on Zen.