The author’s journey is admirable, but his thin memoir fails to relate any sense of spiritual or intellectual development.
Low-key memoir of the author’s search for identity.
Born to a Thai mother and American father, Coffin struggled with his mixed ethnicity through much of his childhood and adolescence, even though his father left the family before the author’s second birthday. Biannual trips to his mother’s home village of Panomsarakram, as well as his discovery of Buddhist philosophy in high school, increased his desire to connect more closely with his mother’s cultural heritage. While studying philosophy at Middlebury College, Coffin began to consider his half-Asian ethnicity as a vital part of his self-identity: “I decided to think of myself as an Asian and a Thai…it gave me a vague excuse to feel unique, exotic, and enigmatic.” In the spring of his junior year, the author received an internship grant to travel to his mother’s village and live for a few months as a monk at the local Buddhist temple. Coffin recalls his spiritual quest in simple, unadorned prose, as he questions his motivations and attempts to achieve the devoted serenity of his fellow monks. After his initiation ceremony, the author embarked on the training required of all new initiates: learning the eight precepts of Buddhism, meditation, ritual chants, maintaining the gardens and lotus ponds, etc. The rigorous labor soon dampened his spirits, and he began to question the monks’ lifestyle: “Rather than chasing after some Ozymandian fantasy, they were content to settle into a balanced state of decay.” Seeking enlightenment, Coffin accompanied his mentor Narong—who taught meditation in exchange for English lessons—on a quest into the forest, where they met the “forest monks” and received alms and gave blessings at various small villages. Unfortunately, the author found little more than banal observations—“This all seemed so unproductive: all this believing in things that you couldn’t see, and searching for knowledge that you’d never be able to use”—and he returned to Panomsarakram, left the temple and spent the remainder of his summer teaching English at the local high school, socializing with the villagers and pining after Lek, a local girl with whom he had spent time during his childhood trips.
The author’s journey is admirable, but his thin memoir fails to relate any sense of spiritual or intellectual development.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-306-81526-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
