Books with title Autobiography of a Yogi

"Autobiography of a Yogi" is an autobiography of Paramahansa Yogananda (January 5, 1893 March 7, 1952) first published in 1946. Yogananda was born Mukunda Lal Ghosh in Gorakhpur, India into a Bengali family. "Autobiography of a Yogi" introduces the reader to the life of Paramahansa Yogananda and his encounters with spiritual figures of both the East and West. The book begins with his childhood family life, to finding his guru, to becoming a monk and establishing his teachings of Kriya Yoga meditation. The book continues in 1920 when Yogananda accepts an invitation to speak in a religious congress in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He then travels across America lecturing and establishing his teachings in Los Angeles, California. In 1935 he returns to India for a yearlong visit. When he returns to America, he continues to establish his teachings, including writing this book. The book is an introduction to the methods of attaining God-realization and to the spiritual thought of the East, which had only been available to a few in 1946. The author claims that the writing of the book was prophesied long ago by the nineteenth-century master Lahiri Mahasava. (Excerpt from Wikipedia)

The glamorous world of big-city geisha is familiar to many readers, but little has been written of the life of hardship and pain led by the hot-springs-resort geisha. Indentured to geisha houses by families in desperate poverty, deprived of freedom and identity, these young women lived in a world of sex for sale, unadorned by the trappings of wealth and celebrity. Sayo Masuda has written the first full-length autobiography of a former hot-springs-resort geisha. Masuda was sent to work as a nursemaid at the age of six and then was sold to a geisha house at the age of twelve. In keeping with tradition, she first worked as a servant while training in the arts of dance, song, shamisen, and drum. In 1940, aged sixteen, she made her debut as a geisha.Autobiography of a Geisha chronicles the harsh life in the geisha house from which Masuda and her "sisters" worked. They were routinely expected to engage in sex for payment, and Masuda's memoir contains a grim account of a geisha's slow death from untreated venereal disease. Upon completion of their indenture, geisha could be left with no means of making a living. Marriage sometimes meant rescue, but the best that most geisha could hope for was to become a man's mistress.Masuda also tells of her life after leaving the geisha house, painting a vivid panorama of the grinding poverty of the rural poor in wartime Japan. As she eked out an existence on the margins of Japanese society, earning money in odd jobs and hard labor―even falling in with Korean gangsters―Masuda experienced first hand the anguish and the fortitude of prostitutes, gangster mistresses, black-market traders, and abandoned mothers struggling to survive in postwar Japan.Happiness was always short-lived for Masuda, but she remained compassionate and did what she could to help others; indeed, in sharing her story, she hoped that others might not suffer as she had. Although barely able to write, her years of training in the arts of entertaining made her an accomplished storyteller, and Autobiography of a Geisha is as remarkable for its wit and humor as for its unromanticized candor. It is the superbly told tale of a woman whom fortune never favored yet never defeated.

In 1946, Paramahansa Yogananda (January 5, 1893–March 7, 1952), published his life story, Autobiography of a Yogi, which introduced many westerners to meditation and yoga. It has since been translated into 25 languages, and the various editions published since its inception have sold over a million copies worldwide. The book describes Yogananda's search for a guru, and his encounters with leading spiritual figures such as Therese Neumann, the Hindu saint Sri Anandamoyi Ma, Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sir C. V. Raman, and noted American plant scientist Luther Burbank, to whom it is dedicated. Amelita Galli-Curci, one of the most famous opera singers of the early twentieth century, said about the book: Amazing, true stories of saints and masters of India, blended with priceless superphysical information–much needed to balance the Western material efficiency with Eastern spiritual efficiency–come from the vigorous pen of Paramhansa Yogananda, whose teachings my husband and myself have had the pleasure of studying for twenty years.

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In Autobiography Chesterton describes his happy childhood, the intellectual ‘doubts and morbidities’ of his youth and his search for a true vocation. He includes many anecdotes about his literary friends, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, and H G Wells. But it is his quest for religious conviction and his conversion to Catholicism that is central to his story which he tells with great modesty, gentleness and intelligence.