Return of the Rishi: A Doctor's Search for the Ultimate Healer

In 1980 Chopra was a chain-smoking Boston physician schooled in Western ways, proud of his beeper, attending to heart and asthma patients. But a meeting with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement, rekindled his interest in the Ayurvedic medicine he knew during his Indian boyhood. How the author gave up his prestigious hospital career, practiced TM and became a leading exponent of the Ayurvedic system in the U.S. is the thrust of this reflective if self-infatuated autobiography. The ancient Indian system of herbal and mineral cures stresses balance with nature and calling upon the patient's inner resources. As Chopra shuttles between growing up in India, medical school (where a holy man was buried alive and survived) and encounters with the ill, one longs for more detail about how Ayurvedic medicine works, and rather less about the guru whom he reveres. (February 17)