Buddha - Karen Armstrong Review

I read this book a few weeks ago. I realized that I did not know much about Buddha even though I was practicing Buddhism for nearly a year. I googled for the best books on Buddhism and decided to purchase this one. Karen Armstrong wrote it from a historian's perspective and if I have one word to describe her work it will be - Marvelous. She starts with providing a background of what the culture in the Indo Gangetic plain was during Siddharth Goutama's time. She remained objective throughout, and separated the myth from reality beautifully. The chapter on Enlightenment was fascinating & so were the descriptions after the enlightenment. Since it is essentially a biography of Buddha, it stuck to it's character of providing a description of Buddha's life. It ventured slightly into the teachings but not too much to lose sight of it's objective. My verdict. Read the book. You'll come to know a lot of things about Buddhism and human emotions which we tend to conveniently ignore