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"Essential Reading"
Marta Szabo's The Guru Looked Good is essential reading for anyone once involved in Siddha Yoga, a spiritual group, movement or organization they questioned, corporate culture, or dysfunctional relationships where they betrayed themselves or felt betrayed. Basically, everyone should read it.

In TGLG, Szabo brilliantly lays bare (without pointing fingers or attacking anyone else's “experience”) the dysfunction festering at the core of Siddha Yoga. Without knowing anything about me personally, Szabo clarified most of the nagging questions I had about the organization - I was involved in SY for over fifteen years - and helped me put together a puzzle I... More > believed unsolvable.

In the past, almost everything I’d ever read about SY that was “critical” (mainly the magazine articles in the 90s, in particular The New Yorker piece by Lis Harris) seemed laced with a nastiness that felt personal and led me to question the motives of the authors. Szabo's book is the opposite - not an attack against an organization but rather a personal account.

In a straightforward, here’s-my-story-draw-your-own-conclusions way, Szabo inspired me look back at my own experience with SY and trust and accept things I’d always known intuitively - suspicions and secrets I’d buried as successfully as SY had buried the truth of its own history.

Szabo helped me finally reconcile the disparity that was always present between my own personal experience (which was overwhelmingly positive) and the things about SY "the organization” that continued to gnaw in my gut. After I finished TGLG I felt a combination of great sadness and great relief.

Szabo's memoir will also be of particular interest to those who were damaged, abused or oppressed as children – and then later sought ways, successful or not, to make sense of themselves, to escape or heal through their relationships, spiritual seeking, drug use, or work in the world.

Speaking as someone previously involved, it has been interesting to note in recent years how SY's once center-stage-in-the-spiritual-community presence has gradually tiptoed off into the wings, and is now heading for the exit - perhaps due to the fact that so much of what Szabo exposes through her memoir finally caught up with them. < Less

"Absolutely Fabulous--- FIVE BIG STARS" i have never been involved with siddha yoga--- i have never searched for, or found, a guru. i have never lived communally or wanted to. that said, The Guru Looked Good was the best read of the winter. Marta Szaba writes with a searing insight into what would make someone give up their choice to think freely. this is the book people pretend Eat, Pray, Love is, but The Guru Looked Good is the real deal.

For every person like Marta Szabo, there are literally tens of thousands of people with many more years in Siddha Yoga then her (like 30 - 40 years and yes many of them have been behind the scenes as she claims she has), with a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FEELING! Its quite obvious that Marta's "ego" got bruised & she didn't get the attention that she wanted, so now she will make sure to get the attention she so badly desires by writing this book (well, she is an author!!!). Seems like "she's" the one who wants to turn a profit off the "Guru business"....... The rest of us who have REALLY been with the "Guru" (for 30 - 40 years) could never be touched by someone this "lost" and who is truly in the minority!!! There's always some "one" who needs to put others down to make themselves feel "good".

"Ironic" I read this book when it was free online. It's not badly written and some of the stories are interesting, but what is ironic is that according to the author herself, this guru and ashram paid for her to take writing classes with the same man who is now her husband who encouraged her to write this book, and the ashram and guru also purchased for the author the very computer on which she wrote what is obviously intended to be a negative book about the same ashram and guru that funded her writing career.

"Disappointing" This is the story of a woman who admits to being a thief from childhood on, stealing throughout her young adulthood, and leaving a big pile of her own turd in front of her landlord’s door, before she went on to take what she could from a spiritual community and guru that gave her love, respect, and opportunities she’d never dreamed of, as she now leaves this big turd at their door. In spite of the author telling stories with the intention of slamming her guru and more so her mother and sisters, the positive qualities of the guru and ashram shine through, and one feels sorry for the family members who are obviously the real target of this book.