Mockett, who speaks Japanese (though not perfectly), is an observant and respectful guide to Japanese customs, open to new...
A journey through Japanese culture and religion by a Japanese-American woman grieving for her dead father and concerned that she will be unable to pass on her heritage to her young son.
Mockett (Picking Bones from Ash, 2009) returned to Japan after the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, accompanied by her mother and her young son. After visiting the family-run temple located not far from the Fukushima nuclear reactor, the author made pilgrimages to other temples, met with priests, examined their treasures and tried out different forms of Buddhist meditation. Doing so provided her with the opportunity to not only describe, often at length, present-day people, buildings, festivals, places, moods and customs, but to delve into the stories behind them. One chapter is devoted to a history of Buddhism, in which readers may be surprised to learn that if they choose, Buddhists are quite free to celebrate one of the many Shinto gods. Because of the radiation danger at the cemetery in 2011, the bones of the author’s grandfather could not be buried during that year’s Obon, the annual Buddhist festival in which ancestors' spirits return to this world to visit their relatives. At the heart of the book is the Obon festival of 2012, a time when the author visited a crematorium for a close-up look at how the Japanese treat the remains of loved ones, attended the burial for her grandfather’s bones, observed Obon’s beautiful and healing rituals, and hoped that it would bring her relief from grief over the death of her father.
Mockett, who speaks Japanese (though not perfectly), is an observant and respectful guide to Japanese customs, open to new experiences and sensitive to changes in the culture. If she sometimes rambles on or wanders off, the trip is still worth it.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0393063011
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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
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
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