A beautifully rendered but flawed exploration of how caste still prevails painfully in modern India.
A British-born novelist who grew up in New Delhi but also spent much of his adult life in New York seeks a closer connection to his native land through explorations into the Brahmin scholarly caste, the “twice-born.”
Taseer (The Way Things Were, 2014, etc.) began tentative forays back to India to learn Sanskrit in the ancient spiritual center of Benares, “the key to secret India,” as his mother told him. “In Benares,” he writes, “it was possible to see in miniature every major event that had etched itself onto India’s consciousness.” The author sought teachers to help him make a more intimate intellectual connection to India. In 2014, he spent many months in the Ganges-skirted city to interview Brahmins, who are by birthright the intellectuals, scientists, astrologers, and scholars of the society; during adolescence, they are “initiated by rite into [their] ancient vocation of the mind.” Taseer felt that penetrating the intellectual secrets of this “twice-born” caste would somehow dispel for him the feeling of always being an outsider—the sense, as Jawaharlal Nehru has written, of feeling a “queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.” In presenting his first-person stories of the Brahmins, the author also examines tales of Hindu nationalists; a scholar trying to synthesize the traditional vs. ancient currents; a revolutionary upstart; a spiritual feminist; and a family man who ultimately cannot wash the dish of the visitor who belongs to a lesser caste because it will contaminate his house and village. Unfortunately, despite Taseer’s earnest attempts to force a declaration of truth from his Brahmin interviewees, he is evasive about his own ethnicity and identity—namely, his Muslim family and his gay sexual orientation—often stranding readers with him in emotional limbo.
A beautifully rendered but flawed exploration of how caste still prevails painfully in modern India.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-27960-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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
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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