By Keith Wagstaff
Daily Trojan

LOS ANGELES (U-Wire)----Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, mosh pits, acid, juvenile hall, inner peace: Noah Levine's road to Buddhist spirituality in "Dharma Punx" is a refreshingly raw take on the self-discovery novel.

Levine, son of spiritual teacher and author Stephen Levine, recounts his youth as an angry young punk in the '80s Santa Cruz hardcore scene and his self-destructive affair with alcohol and hard drugs.

The book is written in the short declarative sentences often found in Buddhist literature, and Levine makes no pretense about his lack of interest in making this work a literary masterpiece.

Occasionally his devotion to simply conveying the path of the dharma (the way of the Buddha) without literary embellishment gives the book a say-no-to-drugs, after-school-TV-special feel.

The book starts off with an anecdote in which the 5-year-old Levine contemplates killing himself with a steak knife. The mood is set for the continuing inner-struggle that plagues him for the majority of his life.

Levine befriends a gang of street punks and falls into the depths of serious alcoholism and addiction. His descriptions of his crack use are so blunt and so frequent that they soon lose their shock value and become disturbingly mundane events.

"Dharma Punx" brings a dimension of gritty realism to the Buddhist self-improvement genre. The reader sees that while Levine discovers the promise of Buddhism, he still suffers as he tries to attain the discipline and will to adhere to its principles.

It is considerably easier to identify with the struggling youth than with an established spiritual leader such as the Dalai Lama.