An exuberant, eye-opening travel quest.
An intrepid journey to the famously reclusive island unearths a paradise amid trauma and obfuscation.
Inspired by his intriguing Sri Lankan neighbors in Tooting, London, British travel writer Gimlette (Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge, 2012, etc.) decided to venture to the country formerly known as Ceylon—a tear-shaped tropical island the size of Ireland off the coast of India and made up of 20 million people, mostly Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims, and just emerging from a vicious long-running civil war (1983-2009). Gimlette moves geographically in his work, from Colombo, the teeming capital, to the perilous interior once replete with the sites of ancient kingdoms; the western coast, which was plundered by the Portuguese for pearls and cinnamon; the south coast, which was transformed by the next invaders, the Dutch, into a canal-laden vision of their home; and the eastern coast, which contains the gorgeous harbor of Trincomalee, where the British invaded in 1795. Each of the occupiers left something behind—e.g., the British administration and education network, which swept away feudalism and left a system of tea-growing estates in the highlands and a Pax Britannica lasting more than a century. The northeast still retained a trace of the "rogue state" founded by the breakaway Tamil Tigers in 2002. An effortless, elegant writer, Gimlette chronicles the stories of these truculent, traumatized people. He explores the still-reigning caste system that made the "Tea Tamils," the women tea pickers, the most poorly paid workers in the country. The author was especially attuned to the nuances between Sinhalese and Tamil, a hostility stoked in the 1950s by the Sinhalese chauvinism of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike into civil war. While the war wounds are deep and ugly, Gimlette finds a vibrant country "full of people beginning their thinking again…starting anew, unencumbered by the certainties of war.”
An exuberant, eye-opening travel quest.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35127-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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