Author: Andrea Thompson
Publication: The New Yorker
Date: February 10, 2003
Celebrity yoga has become its own
industry, generating magazine covers, fashion lines, and now books. Christy
Turlington, the limber supermodel and yoga-clothing designer, ambitiously
combines memoir, historical survey, and instruction manual in LIVING YOGA
(Hyperion). "I discovered that I could be graceful and agile and could
hold my balance in challenging poses, both as a model and as a yogi," she
writes. Two of Turlington's instructors, Sharon Gannon and David Life,
showcase their own form in THE ART OF YOGA (Stewart, Tabori & Chang),
in which philosophical aphorisms accompany glossy black-and-white photographs
of seemingly impossible positions: in Dwi Pada Sirsasana, Life balances
on his hands, hovering inches off the floor with ankles crossed neatly
behind his head.
Mariel Hemingway doesn't claim great
feats of contortion in her memoir, FINDING MY BALANCE (Simon & Schuster),
but she credits yoga with sorting out her turbulent life. The suicide of
her famous grandfather looms large, along with her mother's cancer, one
sister's mental illness, the other's addiction, and Hemingway's own obsessive-compulsive
behaviors. She writes, "I no longer feel a helpless victim of my family's
strange interactions and flawed genetic pool."
Even nonhuman celebrities have joined
the act, albeit with less emphasis on spiritual redemption. Laurent de
Brunhoff's BABAR'S YOGA FOR ELEPHANTS (Abrams) traces yoga back to prehistoric
elephants (who, contrary to human custom, practiced with shoes on). The
elephant king and his queen, Celeste, travel the world mimicking man-made
structures with their asanas: "The Golden Gate Bridge? Two elephants doing
the Cobra."
