My friend Hugh writes with this fantastic commentary from The Guardian. He notes, “Karen Armstrong is one of the best living writers on religion.” This is such a gem that it’s hard to identify the best paragraph to excerpt:
We no longer require our celebrities to go out into the wilderness to bring spiritual benefit to others. The long arduous quest of the hero is alien to those who seek immediate fame with minimum effort on Pop Idol. You can become a star, a luminary of our time, simply by appearing in a soap opera. We do not expect our celebrities to challenge us, as Socrates did, or, like Buddha, to shock us out of our habitual selfishness by making us aware of the ubiquity of human suffering. We want our stars to distract us from these uncomfortable realities.
It’s an exceptionally well thought-out essay on modern heroes, and how they differ from traditional ones. Its themes reminded me slightly of The Hero with A Thousand Faces. She loses a few points near the end when she says “in this time of unprecedented danger, heroic leadership must question old certainties and chauvinisms”. Unprecedented danger? Maybe I’m misunderstanding her, but, practically speaking, we’ve never lived in safer times. Regardless, some exceptional writing.
To my shame, I listed Ms. Armstrong’s Buddha among the books I gave up on. Coincidentally, Hugh, a very smart man, sent me this email and went on to explain ed that I should “read her books – any of her books, she will enlighten you”. So, I guess Buddha gets another chance.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I cannot recommend Karen Armstrong highly enough. She is, in my mind, a religious/historical scholar of lasting significance (with a life story to match). I’ve read and reread her “History of God” and I think it should be recommended reading for everyone taking any kind of cultural/social/religious/historical study in University. I also think that one of her follow-up books – “The Battle for God” is a flawless historical review of the rise of fundamentlism in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. A must-read if you want to have any kind of intelligent understanding of what’s going on with the U.S., Israel and the Middle East.
Finally, Ms. Armstrong has written about her own personal journey from her life as a nun to the present – one book I have not yet read that I can hardly wait to dig into (too many other things on the go right now).
If “Buddha” is anything like the first two books I mentioned, then it will be dense, and perhaps slow-going, but rewarding in the end.