Turtle Feet Chronicles Nikolai Grozni's experiences studying Tibetan Buddhism as an ordained monk in Dharamsala, India. While we see a bit of his life as a monk, the book focuses to a disappointing degree on his eccentric friend Tsar, a Bosnian ex-patriot, ex-monk.This book is amazing. While I wish it had spent more time on the monastic life and significantly less on his friends exploits, it does do a good job of showing how messed up living a completely cloistered life can make people. Fair warning however, do not read this book if you're into political correctness, uber-liberal, or any such thing. Grozni doesn't sugar coat his experiences, and he runs into some pretty stupid out of touch people. A primary example being one of his teachers, Geshe Yama Tseten, who looks up the identity of an animal he claims attacked him on a mountain top in a book about sea life, and is a vitriolic xenophobe when it comes to westerners, calling them fools, and putting them on the same level as domesticated animals in intelligence.
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