Jeffery Paine
[1] "Jeffery Paine is an unusual voice in American letters," observed Indian novelist and Underscretary General of the United Nations Shashi Tharoor, "one steeped in the wisdom of the East and yet infused with a knowing and witty sensibility that is profoundly Western.Through a series of dramatic biographies, extending from Lord Curzon and Gandhi through E. M. Forster and V. S. Naipaul, Paine showed that our everyday assumptions, what unquestioningly we take for granted about politics, religion, and psychology, often have entirely unexpected outcomes when they get immersed in a radically different culture.In the San Francisco Chronicle, the novelist Bharati Mukerjee called the work "groundbreaking"[14] in how it gave a whole new understanding of modern India vis-à-vis the West.[16] Paine followed Re-enchantment with Adventures with the Buddha[17] (2005), which elucidated Buddhism not through teachings or theology but by how it got lived out on a day-to-day basis by Western practitioners from the early Alexandra David-Néel and Lama Govinda to the contemporary Sharon Salzberg and Michael Roach.He appears regularly on C-SPAN, NPR, and other radio and TV programs as well as speaking at the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, ICA (London), and universities around the country.