AMMA: Portrait of a Living Sage

Not so much a biography as a modern-day saint's life, this superficial and fulsome portrait of a contemporary Indian guru will delight followers and leave everyone else cold. Amma is an Indian teacher famous for the thousands of hugs she passes out to strangers. But she does more than hug; she has purportedly healed lepers, calmed turbulent seas and built homes for the poor. Born to a large family, Amma, like most saints, had an especially spiritual childhood. She was captivated by holy things from the earliest age and loved to spend hours in prayer and meditation. Nonetheless, Amma's parents expected her to follow a normal path (i.e., to be married). When she reached marriageable age, they introduced her to three potential husbands, but she ran the suitors off. Distraught, her parents consulted a guru who told them that Amma was destined to be a great spiritual leader and they should not force her to marry. Her parents relented, and Amma went on to build a tremendous ministry which today takes her not only throughout India, but also on annual tours of the United States. Biographer Cornell is insufficiently self-revealing; she flirts with self-disclosure, writing that it has been "a deep healing experience" to write about Amma, but she never squarely lays out her relationship with her subject. Like last year's major biography of the "hugging saint" (Savitri L. Bess's The Path of the Mother ), this book offers no criticism or even analysis. (July)