The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America by Stefanie Syman

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 390 pages, $28)

Yoga first gained a firm hold on the American imagination thanks to an impressive 1898 stunt, said Philip Kennicott in The New Republic. Pierre Bernard, a young man who would later be labeled “The Great Oom,” sat in a quiet trance among a roomful of San Francisco doctors and journalists while a large needle was passed through his earlobe, his cheek, his lip, and his nostril. Bernard’s fascinating life story fills one chapter of Stefanie Syman’s “thorough” new primer on the history of yoga on these shores, which untangles many other strands as it moves toward today’s White House yoga workshops and Wal-Mart yoga mats.

Emerson’s Transcendentalists were the first Americans to dabble in the meditation practices that had been developed in India, said Barbara Spindel in BarnesandNobleReview.com. But wider acceptance took much longer. When the charismatic Swami Vivekananda arrived from India in 1893, a “moral panic” ensued, as his wealthy female disciples set up a yoga camp in Maine and journalists began spinning tales of “shocking secret rituals.” Yoga’s link to scandalous sexual attitudes was cemented after the promiscuous Bernard set up his own camp in 1919. Even so, yoga in 1920s America was focused less on invigorating the body than on quieting the mind.

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How yoga came to be seen as primarily a physical activity is a Hollywood story, said Claire Dederer in Slate.com. When Latvian native Indra Devi arrived in town in 1947, “she had the good sense” to open a yoga school that was “all about the poses.” Fitness-conscious stars, including Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo, quickly helped make hatha yoga the yoga of mainstream America. Syman probably “works a little too hard” trying to explain why yoga has so successfully surfed through each new shift in the larger culture, tying yoga’s enduring popularity to a theory about American-style spirituality. The simpler explanation may be that stretching and twisting our bodies into odd positions is a “pleasant and enjoyable” experience.