Rating: 
Summary: camino review
Review: I, too, have walked the camino, but Shirley MacLaine's descriptions made it very difficult to recognise. I can hardly believe we walked the same paths.I was very disappointed in this book - but have to admit she has a wonderful imagination. I didnt really expect to read more about her dreams than the camino itself. Sadly she made little mention of her arrival in Santiago de Compostela and I did get bored with obsession with the photographers hounding her. I wouldnt give this book any stars, given the option.
Rating: 
Summary: She's a good storyteller...
Review: Especially when she's interjecting incidents having to do with her celebrity. I wonder if these books would be as much fun if she weren't, after all, her. However, I do love this woman and find her stories a lot of fun and I have learned a lot about the world from her. In the long run, Shirley MacLaine is one of the world's best travel writers - a journeywoman of mind, body and spirit. Wherever you are, Shirley (and it is likely you're right around the corner from me, even as I write) here's a big hug and thanks for your gift of another enjoyable adventure!
Rating:
Summary: Truth as she knows it!
Review: I think people get hung up on Shirley because they do not believe what she is saying. Well, the way I look at it is this way, Shirley is writting the truth as she knows it. As a reader it is our responsabity to find our own truth in the work. The amount of truth may be different for each person.I liked this book for many reasons, the thought of walking 500 miles amazes me.If you decide to read this book just keep your mind open and you can gain so much from it.
Rating: 
Summary: CD please!
Review: Dear Shirley and or the publishing company of this great book: Please produce CDs also. I read the hard cover in July of this year I think, loved the book so much! Wish to have the CDs for me to listen during weekends and evenings and earlier mornings. The CDs will surely get me up in the morning, give me sweet dreams, and wonderful, peaceful and enlightened weekends. Cassette tapes are good, but they do not last long. In appreciation, GinYee.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Sure of its Authenticity
Review: Shirley Maclaine has down a power of good in popularising new Age themes and philosophies and this book continues in the same vein.It is a very intersesting account of her spiritual trek on The Camino but I must declare a slight feeling of scepticism when she accounts her dialogues with John the Scot..an entity from the spiritual realm with whom she has shared previous life adventures etc.and on her spiritual pilgrimage was guided throughout by his wisdom and care. It is, as she says herself, all down to our own spiritual experiences if such visitations are truly authentic....in my view I do not doubt her sincerity concerning her feeling that she was in true contact with the spiritual world and one of its inhabitants but it just doesn't "ring true" to me..so you really have to read it yourself to make a judgement concerning this..I beleive it is possible that such things occur but so many new Age exponents make it all sound so easy..and it ain't!
Rating:
Summary: Amusing Mescaline Dream--Unless You Believe
Review: Early in her 500-mile pilgrimage along Spain's Santiago de Compostela Camino in 1994, MacLaine began to hallucinate and see huge metal screws. "I didn't know if that meant I had a screw loose," she writes. Walking some 20 miles a day, subsisting on yogurt and fruit, dogged by curs, mosquitoes and the press, little wonder the otherworldly 66-year-old entertainer had visions so strange she found "it took an act of control not to roll my eyes at myself!" Her previously recounted past lives (as a suicide in Atlantis and an Indian princess) were lively enough; this time she witnesses the origin of the universe and meets the kindred soul who was both Charlemagne and Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, with whom she had an affair before his 1986 assassination. By turns fearful, vain and hostile, MacLaine makes her eccentricity endearing, even if you scoff at how the spirit moves her.
Rating:
Summary: She's one gutsy broad!
Review: Even if you do not hold Shirley MacLaine's New Age beliefs and philosophy of life, her newest book, THE CAMINO, is a fascinating read. The fact that a celebrity in her 6th decade would set out on a 500 mile walk, by herself, in a foreign country is intriguing enough. On two separate occasions, while performing in Brazil, MacLaine received unsigned notes strongly urging her to take a pilgrimage called the Santiago de Compostela Camino across northern Spain. She knew of the Camino, as it is called, but had difficulty in visualizing herself hiking her way through it. Upon further study and the help of a Brazilian friend named Anna Strong who had made the Camino journey herself, MacLaine decided she had nothing to lose and just might gain some further insight into her life and the state of the world. MacLaine's story is very compelling and makes for a very fast read. Of course, there are tales of MacLaine's past lives with Charlemange and Giant Moors and as a wild young gypsy woman, but there is also, at the heart of the book, a wonderful story of a woman's determination to finish a journey and to be open to what the universe had planned for her. I was particularly struck by the clever way she dealt with the ever-present hoards of press that seemed to dog her every step. This is a book worth reading. Take from it what you will, Shirley MacLaine is one tough cookie. I'd hike the mountains with her any day! Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: Profound book; advise author to seek a more quiet mind
Review: Since "The Camino" is itself a very personal book, I feel that the only way I can review it is to be personal as well. I am not a fan of Ms. MacClaine's, though I have been very impressed by the few of her movies I've seen. One time I was very tired traveling on a plane somewhere overseas, and though I wanted to sleep, I simply could not stop watching a movie I really did not want to watch, called "Madame Sousatzka," because Ms. MacClaine's performance was so magnetizing and compelling. I was very glad to find out that she won a Golden Globe for it. I am totally turned off by the cult of celebrity, and I found the parts of this book where the author went through some very trying times because of her celebrity to be weird and disturbing, yet from what she wrote she handled the weirdness well. I had thought that in Europe people were less bamboozled by celebrity than in the US, but apparently I was mistaken. I got a tremendous amount out "The Camino", and am appreciative to the author for that. I feel that each of us on the spiritual path has some or perhaps a lot of the truth, and we bounce off each other on the quest for higher consciousness. No one has anything close to the "whole truth," but in "The Camino" I found a lot of candor, wisdom, humor, pithy insights, food for thought, along with a fine travelogue of what the author experienced, both internally and externally. I have traveled a lot and have grown spiritually from those experiences, and I've also done a number of long distance events to get the endorphins going. Yet I resonate better with the simple knowing that reincarnation and karma are basic laws of life's evolution. I prefer to be present and aware in this life, and not be preoccupied so much about the past, or what happened in Atlantis and Lemuria. I also know how to transcend space time, but again, only the space time in this life. I do not find it helpful to ponder that at some level all my lifetimes are going on at the same time. Thus I only resonated partially with what the author wrote about her regressions to her past lives, which I feel she over-stresses in her books, as well to those places in the distant past where mankind might have lived in a "Garden of Eden." I did get a lot from her discussions about androgyny in Lemuria and "sex divisions" in Atlantis. Whatever the veracity of what she experienced in her "dream visions" in those places, I felt that the insights about sex and the quest for wholeness she gained from them were quite accurate. My basic point of contention with the author's path is that she seems to be on an endless quest for some kind of absolute truth through endless physical and mental activity (to say nothing of her many incarnations), and she never seems to attain it, no matter how much seeking she does. At the beginning of her walk on the Camino, her angel guide Ariel tells her that the path is the goal, but she keeps missing that crucial point, which to me is that few if any souls who come to earth become "totally enlightened," that is, finish the journey, and I don't believe that the "end" is ever achieved by endless "doing" and seeking spiritual experiences. Thus my own suggestion to Ms. MacClaine would be to simply realize how much you do know, how much you have realized, which is considerable, and just quiet your mind and accept where you are, and let go as much as possible. I found myself thinking over and over, Shirley, you've got it, as much as just about anyone can, but then she would start analyzing and intellectualizing her experiences, and seeking more and more of them, and (perhaps) lose it! And there is no doubt that Ms. MacClaine is ready for quieting her mind. She mentions on p. 174 the great teacher, Krishnamurti, who claimed that he could walk for hours without a single thought, surely a superior state to an endlessly seeking mind that in my opinion can never satisfy its thirst for knowledge, awareness, or whatever it is that it/she is seeking. I highly recommend K's first book, "The First And Last Freedom," to any seekers who want to try to see the folly of this endless quest for "enlightenment," and just be, w/o the need to become, ceaselessly. I also do not agree at all that everything in life has meaning, purpose, and that we create our own reality at all times. There is truth in all of these points, but I feel that these are very simplistic New Age notions that seem to satisfy those who have to be certain that they can "know" the truth, the truth about our lives, the truth about the universe (whatever that is - I, a mere mortal, would never claim to understand the "universe"), etc. And Ms. MacClaine's endless search for this impossible "knowing" doesn't even work for her - just read the part of the book where she says that she still feels like a caterpillar waiting to become a butterfly. Personally if I won just one of the awards she has won, or wrote even one international bestseller, or had the phenomenal experiences she's had in her productive life, I would be satisfied. This is a profound book and I highly recommend it, whatever my judgements!
Rating:
Summary: Earth calling Shirley
Review: Shirley MacClain's account of her journey is vintage Shirley, just what one would expect if the reader is aware of Shirley's views on reincarnation and spiritual matters. Her descriptions of the camino are valid to her experience. That said, readers should not look to Shirley's adventures as likely to occur to any other pilgrim on the road. The blisters, dirt, beauty and sense of accomplishment, yes, but not magical adventures.
Rating:
Summary: A Spiritual Journey
Review: I really enjoyed the story of Shirley's trek. I have to admit I was more interested in the details of the Camino itself, then her discussion of her past lives and metaphysical experiences. Her storytelling kept me interested throughout the whole book except for chapter 15 where she really gets into the whole past lives thing. Don't get me wrong, I am open to reading and hearing about it but a whole chapter was more than I could handle. Overall, I really enjoyed this book! Shirley's account of her daily experiences on the Camino and her spiritual journey were inspiring. Reading this book has really sparked my interest about learning more about the Camino.
| 
