The Greek-Armenian teacher G. I. Gurdjieff was one of the most original and provocative spiritual teachers in the twentieth-century West. Whereas much work on Gurdjieff has been either fawning or blindly critical, acclaimed scholar and writer Roger Lipsey balances sympathic interest in Gurdjieff and his “Fourth Way” teachings with a historian’s sense of context and a biographer's feel for personality and relationships. Using a wide range of published and unpublished sources, Lipsey explores Gurdjieff’s formative travels in Central Asia, his famed teaching institution in France, and the development of the teacher.

Review:
  “If Gurdjieff were shown this work, he probably wouldn’t say, as for P. D. Ouspensky, ‘Good journalist!’ but rather, ‘Aah...objective thinking!’ Or simply, ‘Bravo!’”   
      —Alexandre de Salzmann, vice president, Institute G. I. Gurdjieff, Paris