This book is very well researched, a fairly thorough appraisal of yoga in the United States, from the Transcendentalists to the present. Syman shows that the various tensions we now see in yoga today have been present almost from the beginning. These tensions include spirituality vs. a broad appeal, religion vs. commercialism, and classical yoga vs. tantra. This may be a personal bias, but one disappointment for me was the failure to mention anything about John Friend and the establishment of Anusara Yoga, a fruition of these tensions in the American context if there ever was one. In addition, the book "asserts" the arrival of American yoga, without making peace with these tensions. It devolves somewhat into an "appreciation" of a diversity of styles. Perhaps this, is the lesson after all, that yoga in America is not unique at the highest level, but as in the land of its origin, a unity in tolerant diversity.