Remarkably candid; a deeply fascinating account of Thailand and Buddhism.
An intimate look into the unique experience of entering the Buddhist monkhood in Thailand.
Phansa is a common tradition in Thailand: Young Buddhist men are ordained for a monthslong retreat in a monastery during the country’s rainy season, only to disrobe at the end and return to their lives as laymen. A successful, married writer with two young children and a steady job in Bangkok at the Metropolitan Waterworks Authority, Limpichart undertook this task in 1974, later in life than some, spurred by his own intense sense of duty and pragmatic spirit. Titled Khon Nai Phaa Leuang in the original Thai, Limpichart’s memoir documents his early preparation and ordination, along with his time spent at the temple of Wat Prathat Doi Kong Mu, located not far from the country now widely called Myanmar. His account here is not strictly of the lessons gleaned from Dhamma or the teachings of the Buddha but rather his experiences while studying it, as he learned to adapt to a more contemplative existence, free from distractions. Landau’s translation is approachable, never sacrificing the author’s subdued wit or thoughtful knack for descriptions. English readers unfamiliar with Thailand will find the fogs over Mae Hong Son, along with many other settings, vividly described. And while many of Limpichart’s own ruminations focus on the physical—stiff toes from meditating, the wet air of the monsoon season, chafed thighs and cut feet from taking alms—there are also explorations of surprisingly familiar emotional struggles not unique to the monkhood, such as loneliness and the importance of humility, whether concerning faith or just completing day-to-day tasks. The lone flaw in the book’s presentation is a lack of context; those unfamiliar with Thai or Buddhist culture will no doubt find some attitudes and social mores jarring, even alien, and a more comprehensive primer about customs in this part of the world could have easily remedied this, much in the same way the remarkable photos of Limpichart’s ordination help illustrate a ceremony few have experienced firsthand.
Remarkably candid; a deeply fascinating account of Thailand and Buddhism.Pub Date: April 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481863094
Page Count: 312
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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