A generously observed memoir of an American finding her way in India.
Chronicle of the five years the author spent in India defining herself as “a journalist, an adventurer, a woman.”
In the early 2000s, Kennedy was a restless 20-something journalist living and working in New York. Unwilling to wait for her ideal job to find her, she decided to “kick [her] way out of the claustrophobia of normalcy” and become what she most wanted to be—a foreign correspondent. The author relocated to India, where a British great-aunt had served as a missionary and where her own parents had lived during the early years of their marriage. The transition to her new home in New Delhi was difficult and at times painful; she was a feringhee (foreign) woman on her own in a city that did not receive many international visitors and in a culture that did not look favorably upon single females. Kennedy writes how “[e]yes followed me everywhere unless I was safely ensconced inside a five-star hotel.” She discovered that the only way she could gain any respect (and find more permanent lodgings for herself) was to present herself as a married woman with a husband abroad. In this guise, Kennedy began a process of cultural assimilation that eventually brought her into contact with the unforgettably colorful Indian women whose lives are at the heart of her story. Some, like her maid Rhada, were poor; others, like her neighbor Geeta, came from more privileged classes. Ethnicity, caste and cultural traditions separated these women, but the more Kennedy came to know them, the more she found how their traditional concerns with love and marriage were—however much as she tried to disavow it—also her own. Part personal account, part extended reportage on an ancient culture in the throes of modernization and part nonfiction narrative of manners, the book offers an intimate look at the nature, problems and limits of both Western and non-Western female freedoms in a country where “nothing is sharper than the tug of tradition and family.”
A generously observed memoir of an American finding her way in India.Pub Date: April 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6786-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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