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Turtle Feet | 
 enlarge | Author: Nikolai Grozni
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $9.33
You Save: $15.62 (63%)
New (39) Used (17) from $9.33
Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 233835
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 159448984X
Dewey Decimal Number: 294.3657092
EAN: 9781594489846
ASIN: 159448984X
Publication Date: May 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Nikolai Grozni was a music prodigy, a jazz pianist training at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, when suddenly he decided to transform his life. He moved to India to become a Buddhist monk shaving his head, learning Tibetan, and donning long traditional robes. In the Himalayas living in a hut a stone s throw from the Dalai Lama s compound Grozni became entrenched in a sometimes comical, sometimes reverent, always intriguing community comprised of feisty nuns, bossy monks, violent chess players, demanding teachers, and a spectacular friend called Tsar, a fallen monk from Bosnia.
Grozni went to India in search of knowledge, but learns that the people who can teach him the most are not wearing uniforms and following special diets, but rather those who, like him, struggle with doubts and cannot accept an established system of faith. Instead, he journeys with his colorful cast of friends to a new understanding of himself and his place in the world.
Like Anne Lamott or Elizabeth Gilbert, Nikolai Grozni offers the insights of a religious pilgrim from the inside in his case, from a male, Buddhist perspective. Thoughtful, funny, and elegantly written, Turtle Feet details the reality of a world much mythologized in the West and tells a wonderfully bittersweet story of a spiritual journey.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Spiritual and scandalous too.... May 21, 2008
June Carver (Kansas City, MO)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
I finished Turtle Feet last night before bed, and I dreamt all night about one of the characters--the eccentric, ribald, rebellious and loveable alcoholic womanizing Bosnian ex-monk called Tsar. I never expected that this book would make me laugh so hard and dream so vividly. I chose the book because I was curious to know what could make a handsome, gifted young man with so much musical talent--who had only just managed to get out of Bulgaria to the States--decide to give up everything and enter a Tibetan monastery. I didn't expect that Grozni's monastic world would be so down to earth, filled with so many quirky, damaged, endearing, curious, intriguing, and truly sympathetic characters. I had not expected to encounter sexually frustrated monks, nuns on the verge of nervous breakdowns, weary adventurers plagued by loneliness and longing, competitive chess players brawling over matches, and most interesting to me--people who struggle, as I do, with the question of whether they have chosen the right path. Is what they are committed to meaningful and worthwhile, or of it is just another farce, another man-made construction in this absurd world? This was a great book! Moving, enlightening and damn funny. It is definitely a must read if you are interested in Tibet and monks and spirituality... For me though, I loved it because it gave me a clever, irreverent, sometimes hilarious insider's peek behind the curtain into a secret world--a world that I had no idea was scandalous as often as it is spiritual and serene.
Wry and Wise June 11, 2008
L. Young (West Orange, NJ USA)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Are you tired of reading Buddhist books about serene, serious, saffron robed monks sitting on cushions mediatating on the nature of emptiness? Then it's time for 'Turtle Feet' a raucous look at what Buddhist life is really like.
Author Grozni, a Bulgarian music prodigy studying jazz piano at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, decides to chuck it all and go to India in order to learn the meaning of life. He travels to Dharamsala, home of the Dalai Lama in exile and thousands of Tibetan refugees from Communist China. There Grozni becomes a monk newly named Lodro Chosang.
The streets of Dharamsala are teeming with life as thousands converge there from all over the world to study the dharma and perhaps get a glimpse of the Dalai Lama. Grozni's account of his life of poverty there is vivid and his assortment of friends fascinating. Grozni lives with a Bosnian war refugee with no passport named, Tsar. Tsar is an ex-monk, having violated one of the Buddhist precepts and having had sex with a beautiful Israeli girl. Other members of the household include Mona Lisa, a huge green snake, a plethora of rats (one named Thomas Edison) and various other wild life large and small.
While Grozni studies at the nearby monastery with an emotionally abusive Geshe (Geshe being the Ph.d of the monk world), attempting to memorize sacred texts and master advanced debating techniques worthy of samurai warriors, Tsar carouses, plays chess for hours, smokes dope and ruminates about how to get out of India with no passport.
Years go by, friends come and go and Grozni learns that to understand something clearly one must give it up. His Buddhist journey is wry and wise.
 Interesting, but a little disappointing. June 23, 2008
L.A. in CA
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
While the author of "Turtle Feet" is a very talented writer, (when he is describing the beauty of his surroundings, he sometimes verges on the poetic) in this book, he spends way, way too much time detailing the exploits of his manic, foul-mouthed, Bosnian, ex-Monk friend, Tsar. Grozni's religious/spiritual experiences as a novice monk take a back seat to Tsar's theatrics.
People in India - like people everywhere - all share certain human traits. You get a bunch of young men living together in a community (even a Tibetan Buddhist community) and there are going to be some there with bad tempers, some with mental problems, some who swear like sailors, some who love to talk about sex, and some who use drugs. Maybe the author thought it was important to let us know this. But there is so much more that he could have shared with us - things unique to his life in India - that he did not.
While the book offers a glimpse into a far-off world, it left me wishing the author had "waxed poetic" on more occasions and spent less time on his friend's passport/housing/woman troubles.
One of the best, most vivid Buddhist adventure books ever July 2, 2008
Mark Meyer (Kenmore, NY USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I can't say enough good things about this wonderful, exciting book. It has everything in it: vivid descriptions of horrid conditions, cuddly rats, snakes named Mona Lisa, very insightful passages about Buddhist teaching presented in a non-dogmatic way, linguistic trivia and examples, and of course extremely vibrant human characters. You might think that if Tsar, the Bosnia ex-monk who is constantly playing chess, fighting, making love and planning to escape India, is the central character, and he is, that the author couldn't paint others in as realistic a light. And yet he does. Vinnie, the crazy 70-year-old German who pisses on the floor of the kitchen and whose feet are oderiferous in the extreme, comes across in full living technicolor. But surprisingly, the author paints himself as a real human in no-less detail, which was really really neat. I almost feel as if I know him. I certain feel as if he and I share the same common human traits of desire for englightenment, and everything baser. But it is more than that. The book's details and word painting are just staggering. Excellent job! I wish I could read Bulgarian in order to enjoy your other books. You (Mr. Grozni) are one superb author!!!!
 Not about spirituality July 22, 2008
Corinna
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
For anybody who would like to read a book about Tibetan Buddhist spirituality - this is not about this topic. Unlike most Westerns the author does not join Buddhism in search of mystical experience but enters the path at its most repressed, intellectual and dogmatic - as a Buddhist monk specializing in philosophical debate. Surprisingly, at the same time he is full of rebellion and describes his Buddhist teachers and fellow monks and nuns as incredibly stupid, uncompassionate, sex-crazed and even abusive. The majority of this book deals with the author's friends which are a drug-taking, prostitute-visiting, violent and foul-mouthed bunch who have no interest in Buddhism whatsoever. All in all the author comes across as well-intentioned but incredibly immature.
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