A difficult, intensely interior journey, both anthropological and emotional.
Poignant, fragile memoir by social anthropologist Armbrecht (Settlements of Hope: An Account of Tibetan Refugees in Nepal, 1989) chronicles her search for the sacred in work and family.
Trained at Harvard, the author ventured to rural southeastern Nepal during the 1990s to study the relationship between the villagers and their land use in a region bordering a new national park. Her developing connection with these hard-laboring, superstitious people transformed not only her research but the way she resolved to live her life. During an 18-month stint of research for her doctorate, Armbrecht lived among the Yamphu Rai people in Hedangna, a remote village in the Makalu-Barun region. “I wanted to understand their perspectives on the area’s recent designation as a conservation area,” she writes. “I was also there because I wanted to discover how to live more simply and more lightly on the earth.” The initially wary villagers began to accept and befriend her, and she eventually grasped the complicated significance of kipat. This Nepali word describes plots of land that were cleared by ancestors and passed along; the boundaries between individual plots depended on the relationships between landowners rather than on the “law.” Gradually, Armbrecht’s connections with the Yamphu Rai became the point of her research; they served to underscore the lack of true intimacy with her husband back home in Cambridge. Feeling isolated from the culture she returned to, the author gropes to express what went wrong in her marriage, frequently stumbling into murky self-pity. The birth and all-consuming care of a daughter helped her achieve clarity, as well as her study of herbal medicine, which offered Armbrecht a “tradition rooted in my own physical and cultural landscape,” similar to what she had witnessed in the lives of women in Hedangna. Through her work, she makes a valiant attempt to be true to herself while maintaining a reverence for the ground she inhabits, along with the rest of humanity.
A difficult, intensely interior journey, both anthropological and emotional.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-231-14652-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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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