Here’s fantastic summer reading for you: “Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work” by Gary Lachman, a founding member of the band Blondie and a gifted British author who started reading Steiner’s books in the 1980s.

Lachman chronicles Steiner’s remarkable narrative, but maintains a critical distance on Steiner’s most abstract or “far out” thoughts.

Lachman writes: “Personally, I have been familiar with Steiner’s work for more than two decades, and while I still find enormously suggestive insights in his lectures, and am always surprised to discover something new in them, it is his early work on Goethe and consciousness rather than the major occult books to which I find it most rewarding to return. The importance of Steiner’s fundamental insight: that the human I is an irreducible reality; that it is free; that consciousness, spirit, is at the core of existence itself; and that we, for so long alienated from the world around us, are really the solution to its riddle, is impossible to overestimate. If it were ever to take the central position is should occupy in our ideas about ourselves and the cosmos, it would, quite literally, inaugurate the start of a new age. But when, or if, this might happen is still anybody’s guess.”

I’ve tried other Steiner biographies and, believe me, they can be slow going! This one is a real page tuner and you’ll feel as you’re reading that you are wrapped in Steiner’s gorgeous, glowing, saintly aura.