eye of a conscientious journalist. She has woven a rich tapestry from the threads of her own life, her yoga practice and experience with Iyengar, and the story of yoga. Kandetsky paints an intimate and candid portrait of life at the Iyengar school in Pune. She describes the tremendous power of yoga practice in this setting, as it worked on her own life at every level. She does not flinch from showing the tyrannical, often capricious attitudes of Iyengar and his daughter Geeta, and son Prashant. She shines light on the petty rivalries between Iyengar and other great yoga masters, on their roots in nationalism and other struggles for patronage and prestige. She investigates the origins of yoga, and raises sincere doubts about the legends of its antiquity. From this clarity of unrelenting objectivity combined with the understanding in her own cells, she offers a powerful validation of yoga. Despite the contradictions and falsehoods around yoga, she shows how it meets her needs -- and the different needs in India and the West, as it continues to grow, mutate, and reach millions of people. Towards the end of the book, she describes her last class with the master -- after she had admitted learning another system - the Ashtanga system of Pattabhi Jois, his lifelong rival. She was challenged to perform the scorned series in front of Iyengar, who nevertheless could not resist, as she went along through the despised "jumpings", teaching it to her as he saw it might