Interpreting Ramakrishna is a substantial and conscientious work of scholarly and religious reflection, the best resource we have for understanding Sri Ramakrishna today. Instigated by recent debates about Ramakrishna’s identity and significance, the book fruitfully invites us to step back and take a much longer perspective, noticing a century’s worth of Ramakrishna scholarship by devotees, monastic writers, and academic scholars. But the book also looks forward to how we — with all our varied interests and perspectives — can most fruitfully reflect on Ramakrishna in the 21st century. We can only thank Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana for showing us how to remember, think clearly, and write constructively about Ramakrishna, with an honesty that is critical, unpresuming, and in fact deeply spiritual.

—Francis X. Clooney, S.J.
Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard Divinity School

See also free downloads: Kali's Child Revisited or Didn't Anyone Check the Documentation? and 
The Missing Text

WE RECOMMEND that if you're interested in studying Sri Ramakrishna, you read Christopher Isherwood's Ramakrishna and His Disciples as an alternative to Kali's Child. The Isherwood biography is based on research of primary sources that rely on first-hand accounts of those close to Sri Ramakrishna when he lived.