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
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
