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
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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