An insider’s view of the struggles inherent in any attempt to straddle different cultures.
In her debut, memoirist and anthropologist Enslin writes of her experiences marrying a high-caste Brahman man, giving birth and living with his family on the central plains of Nepal.
While earning her doctorate from Stanford University, the author altered her course after meeting Pramod, a student from Nepal. Originally slated to study African culture for her thesis, she changed her focus to India so that she and Pramod could conduct their anthropology fieldwork together. They briefly visited Nepal to meet his family and then returned to the United States to marry and finish their coursework. After her unexpected pregnancy constrained her fieldwork, Enslin shifted her focus to Nepali women’s political movements. She lived with her in-laws off and on for the next eight years, and cultural differences became tantamount as she was exposed to caste distinctions. Aama, Pramod’s mother, became a central figure in the author’s life, telling stories, creating songs, learning to read, mediating disputes and almost running for political office. She smoothed Enslin’s transition into the family and her new homeland. The author opens a window on a multigenerational rural family, showing how outside tensions and upheaval affect them. With an anthropologist’s eye, she describes weddings, childbirth and women’s gatherings. Her observations have been honed by years of daily chores and family intimacy, and she conveys the difficulties in fitting into her husband’s home and adapting to Nepali culture while earning a doctorate and preparing for the birth of her son. “I remembered my research filtered through a haze of poor planning, pregnancy, sleeplessness, and mild postpartum depression,” she writes. The author also includes a helpful glossary of Nepali words at the end of the book.
An insider’s view of the struggles inherent in any attempt to straddle different cultures.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1580055444
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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