I talked to New York's supreme book interviewer/ radio host last Thursday. You can listen here.

"Ms Syman takes a guru-centric approach, charting the path of the thinkers, spiritual leaders, celebrities and quacks that brought yoga into the mainstream. The result is well-researched and rich in character studies... Ultimately, the book is a cultural study of America, and the country's ability to assimilate just about anything." Read more.

The Subtle Body came in just below Michael Lewis and above Anthony Boudain. See the whole list. Scroll down for nonfiction.

The Editors ran an interview and their first online book signing in which I answered reader questions.

"It’s hard to read The Subtle Body (FSG), Stefanie Syman’s terrific new history of yoga in America, without noticing the starring role New York City has played as one giant asphalt yoga mat." Read more.

"Syman crafts an impressively coherent narrative, chronicling the discipline's expansion and contraction through the years." Read more.

"What Ms. Syman does do deftly is trace how the likes of Emerson (with his interest in Indian thought) and Thoreau (with his practice of meditation) helped create a context in which an American yoga could take root. And she provides a lively gallery of larger-than-life characters who would contribute to (or undermine, or co-opt) the progress of yoga in the United States..." Read more.

Pankaj Mishra reviewed the book--a "spacious history of yoga in America"--and I talked to Sam Tanenhaus about the book for their weekly podcast.

I answered reader questions at the top yoga blog. Read the conversation here.

Albuquerque's alternative weekly ran a cover feature and an interview.

"Syman gives a terrific overview of the teachers whose names are now so much a part of the history of yoga in this country: Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Prabhavananda, Indra Devi, Jois and Bikram." Read more.

"Syman ably demonstrates how the history of yoga reflects larger conflicts in American culture." Read more.

You can listen here.

"Syman opens her history at the White House Easter Egg Roll of 2009, at which First Lady Michelle Obama welcomed the crowd to enjoy a wide range of happy, healthy entertainments... It is a remarkable vantage point for a retrospective look at a longer and richer history of yoga, beginning a century and a half earlier with the orientalist fascination of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Syman makes the provocative and fascinating claim that Henry David Thoreau, who built a cabin on a lake in Massachusetts in his effort to “live deliberately,” is the “first in a lineage of American Yogis.” And she repeatedly asks (if not always answers) the questions one wishes were more evident in Love’s book: What is a guru? Is he a monk who can teach us how to transcend the beastliness and boredom of human existence? A magician who can unlock the mysteries of the occult? A charlatan or a God-man?" Read more.

"...Syman profiles a great array of colorful yogis and yoga teachers while chronicling with remarkable knowledge and wit all the permutations yoga has undergone. Of particular pleasure and discovery are Syman’s coverage of yoga in Hollywood, the profound social changes propelling the union of yoga and psychedelics in the hippie era, and the yoga for success of more recent vintage."

"Journalist Syman traces American enthusiasm for yoga back to Thoreau and follows it through cycles of waxing and waning popularity... When she pulls back to view the culture mashup yoga has become—'a cure for back pain, a beauty regime, and a route to God'—she gives a cogent, engrossing analysis of this Asian-born spiritual practice turned all-American panacea."

"THE SUBTLE BODY is an enthralling book, and an enlightening one."  

"These days, doing the downward-facing dog and saying "namaste" in a room full of sweaty half-naked strangers is about as freaky as drinking a latte at Starbucks. Who knew that the curious history of yoga in this country could also be such an interesting, insightful sideways cultural history of modern America at large?"  

"Many of us have been waiting for decades to read a comprehensive history of yoga in the United States.  Stefanie Syman has written that history and she has written it very well.  I recommend this book to the 16 million people who practice yoga in this country, as well as to anyone who simply wonders what the fuss is all about."

 

"As this intriguing narrative chronicles, few points of dynamic transfer in the encounter between East and West have proven more useful to creative Americans than the ancient philosophy and exercise regime of yoga.  For its many practitioners, yoga fuses body, mind, spirit, energy, and attitude into an alembic of well-being harmonizing self and non-self, struggle and peace."