Bhaskarananda

Bhaskarananda was a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and led the Vedanta Society in Seattle for several decades, and The Essentials of Hinduism is his attempt to lay the whole thing out for readers who arrive knowing nothing: the major schools, the deities and what they represent, the stages of life, the caste system and how it is defended and attacked, the practices. He writes from inside the tradition, as a monk of an order rather than as a historian of religion, and the book explains rather than argues. It has been used in university courses for that reason.