The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2023 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, NPR, TIME MAGAZINE & MORE
“Masterful . . . A book of inner journeys told through extraordinary exteriors . . . One of his very best.” —Washington Post
“Dazzling.” —Time Magazine, Best Books of 2023
From “one of the most soulful and perceptive writers of our time” (Brain Pickings): a journey through competing ideas of paradise to see how we can live more peacefully in an ever more divided and distracted world.
Paradise: that elusive place where the anxieties, struggles, and burdens of life fall away. Most of us dream of it, but each of us has very different ideas about where it is to be found. For some it can be enjoyed only after death; for others, it’s in our midst—or just across the ocean—if only we can find eyes to see it.
Traveling from Iran to North Korea, from the Dalai Lama’s Himalayas to the ghostly temples of Japan, Pico Iyer brings together a lifetime of explorations to upend our ideas of utopia and ask how we might find peace in the midst of difficulty and suffering. Does religion lead us back to Eden or only into constant contention? Why do so many seeming paradises turn into warzones? And does paradise exist only in the afterworld – or can it be found in the here and now?
For almost fifty years Iyer has been roaming the world, mixing a global soul’s delight in observing cultures with a pilgrim’s readiness to be transformed. In this culminating work, he brings together the outer world and the inner to offer us a surprising, original, often beautiful exploration of how we might come upon paradise in the midst of our very real lives.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2023 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, NPR, TIME MAGAZINE & MORE
“Masterful . . . A book of inner journeys told through extraordinary exteriors . . . One of his very best.” —Washington Post
“Dazzling.” —Time Magazine, Best Books of 2023
From “one of the most soulful and perceptive writers of our time” (Brain Pickings): a journey through competing ideas of paradise to see how we can live more peacefully in an ever more divided and distracted world.
Paradise: that elusive place where the anxieties, struggles, and burdens of life fall away. Most of us dream of it, but each of us has very different ideas about where it is to be found. For some it can be enjoyed only after death; for others, it’s in our midst—or just across the ocean—if only we can find eyes to see it.
Traveling from Iran to North Korea, from the Dalai Lama’s Himalayas to the ghostly temples of Japan, Pico Iyer brings together a lifetime of explorations to upend our ideas of utopia and ask how we might find peace in the midst of difficulty and suffering. Does religion lead us back to Eden or only into constant contention? Why do so many seeming paradises turn into warzones? And does paradise exist only in the afterworld – or can it be found in the here and now?
For almost fifty years Iyer has been roaming the world, mixing a global soul’s delight in observing cultures with a pilgrim’s readiness to be transformed. In this culminating work, he brings together the outer world and the inner to offer us a surprising, original, often beautiful exploration of how we might come upon paradise in the midst of our very real lives.
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Community Reviews
thenextgoodbook.com
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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