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Rating: 
Summary: Beware of "reviewers" who have not read the book
Review: Firstly, this is not a review of Gordon White's book because i know nothing about the book. I just want to alert the visitors about some annonymous cowards who want to use Amazon's server space to push their ugly poltical agenda by bashing organizations that have nothing to do with the other reviews being posted here. One such example is the so called "review" titled "beware of other reviews." Its obvious that this person has never even seen the book. I request Amazon.com to delete the aforementioned "review." As for Tantra I just purchased "Tantric Yoga and the Wisdom Goddesses: Spiritual Secrets of Ayurveda
by David, Dr. Frawley " from AMAZON.COMThank you Amazon!
Rating:
Summary: Beware of "reviewers" who have not read the book
Review: Firstly, this is not a review of Gordon White's book because i know nothing about the book. I just want to alert the visitors about some annonymous cowards who want to use Amazon's server space to push their ugly poltical agenda by bashing organizations that have nothing to do with the other reviews being posted here. One such example is the so called "review" titled "beware of other reviews." Its obvious that this person has never even seen the book. I request Amazon.com to delete the aforementioned "review." As for Tantra I just purchased "Tantric Yoga and the Wisdom Goddesses: Spiritual Secrets of Ayurveda
by David, Dr. Frawley " from AMAZON.COM Thank you Amazon!
Rating: 
Summary: Such "scholarship" saddens
Review: This book raises many questions: How do you interpret ancient texts? Are words to be taken literally in all contexts, or does one ask people who are within the tradition for the meanings associated with them? White chooses to ignore tradition to insist that his literal meaning of esoteric terms is the right although living Kaulas would find it wrong. Unfortunatly, this book sinks to the same level as Kripal's book on Ramakrishna. There is nothing redeeming in this work.
Rating: 
Summary: Beware of Other Reviews
Review: This is simply to alert others to the ideological motivations behind some of the reviews that have started appearing regarding Dr. White's book. At the first, let it be known that Dr. White's scholarship is grounded in a lifetime of serious research in the source materials of his subject matter. This book, like "The Alchemical Body" before it, represents a substantial contribution to the history of religious practice in South Asia, regardless of the differences other scholars may have with some of his more controversial conclusions.
Now to the point of my review. There is now current among a group of self-appointed custodians of the Hindu religion the practice of inundating amazon (and the web generally) with their half-baked criticisms of scholarship relating to the study of Hinduism. Such reviewers typically possess neither training in the discipline of history or even so much as the basic liberal education of the proverbial "general reader". Instead, they are drawn mainly from among engineers and computer programmers (many of them living in the U.S.), who lack entirely the sort of critical habits of mind necessary to even appreciate the protocols of any humanistic discipline. Indeed, some are so arrogant as to assert that their specialized training in a physical science or a branch of engineering renders them more "objective" or "scientific" when it comes to humanistic pursuits. While I myself am well educated in the physical sciences and hold their methods in the highest regard, it is nevertheless the case that such education not infrequently is accompanied by philistinism and intellectual vulgarity when it comes to matters requiring a different sort of intellectual comportment.
At the heart of the criticisms expressed here is the assumption that being born a Hindu entitles one to make claims regarding maters of scholarly concern on the basis of little or no study. Mostly undertaken by brahmans affiliated with or sympathetic to the politics of the fascist sangh parivar in India, such people seek to equate Hinduism as a whole throughout its history with the contemporary beliefs and practices of the modern-day middle class Hindu. Thus, any suggestion that "tantra" does not mean what some modern-day people take it to mean is evidence for these people of White's neo-orientalism, his desire to create for himself a world of his own western fancy. So, the bottom line, then, is to recognize that amazon reviews on such matters have become largely unreliable for most people who are relatively unaware with this particular form of anti-intellectualism.
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