My father's guru

In My Father's Guru, Jeffrey Masson has written a stunning coming-of-age story - an astonishing "prequel" to his critically acclaimed Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst. Masson grew up in the 1940s and 1950s with a guru in his house - the celebrated mystic Paul Brunton (P.B. to those who knew him), who numbered Masson's parents among his handful of close disciples and singled out the young Jeff as a potential heir to his spiritual kingdom. In 1956, P.B. convinced the Massons that a third world war was imminent and recommended they move to Montevideo, a "safe" location. From Uruguay, Masson went off at P.B.'s bidding to study Sanskrit at Harvard, where he came to understand the man was not what he presented himself to be. Written with wit and an affection tinged with disillusion that is never bitter, My Father's Guru is a fascinating memoir in the tradition of Geoffrey Wolff's The Duke of Deception; a book not only about P.B., but about what it means to grow up in the shadow of a man who laid claim to such enormous power. In emerging from the hothouse world of spiritually, Masson began a journey through disillusion into a critical understanding of the roots of power and powerlessness.