"Oneness with the Big Self"

"Soon, Marilyn Monroe was claiming that yoga improved her legs. Yehudi Menuhin wrote the foreword to Devi’s 1959 book 'Yoga for Americans.' Yoga was quietly going mainstream. Syman slightly discounts the contributions of B. K. S. Iyengar, the author of 'Light of Yoga' (1966), the most widely read book on modern yoga, and gives Devi credit 'for ridding hatha yoga of sordid associations and accumulated ill will.' Indeed, she writes, 'Indra Devi was so good at packaging hatha yoga as a defense against illness and aging' that it became 'easy to lose sight of its real purpose—spiritual liberation.'"

In The New York Times, Pankaj Mishra reviews Stefanie Syman's The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America and Robert Love's The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America.