Review of Crooked Cucumber

Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki

by David Chadwick

Broadway Books, New York, 1999,  468 pp.

If you’ve read Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and find it a treasure, this book is for you. If you want a good story, this book is for you. If you want to be brought into the embrace of sorrow, joy, humility, disillusion, bewilderment and amazement, this book is for you. If you want to know what it's about, I can’t tell you.

The essence of this Zen Master cannot be defined. For both he and this very full story of his life by a direct student are soft and strong, gentle and fierce, yielding and firm, despairing and so, so funny. If you read it, it’ll knock your socks off. I bow to David Chadwick for this very alive story of a humble giant. And I bow to Suzuki Roshi in a bow that can never end.


-- reviewed by Dawn Kurzka


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