Unraveling through alleyways, crack houses and treatment centers, Rao's story provocatively blurs the lines between myth and...
Cultures clash as Hindu gods take center stage against a backdrop of modern American drug addiction.
For Indian-American Rao, growing up was a cultural tug of war. He was caught between the gritty reality of Southside Chicago, with its sensuality, vanity and materialism, and the highly ordered Hindu universe of strict religious adherence. With a devout Hindu father who made significant sacrifices to become a doctor in America, the household was a fortress of tradition. “Our lives would never be tainted by the confusion and doubt that plagued the Western mind,” writes the author. “We had been provided a rule book and a script for our lives. Only a fool would disregard a perfect system refined by centuries of pious living.” Unable to reconcile his strictly traditional heritage with his increasingly American identity, Rao became a spiritual vagabond and a chameleon, able to change roles to suit any occasion. Petty drug dealing earned him respect among his peers, but he soon slipped into cocaine and then crack abuse, which served as a shelter from his cultural confusion. He continued to spiral downward, with the next hit of crack becoming the entire focus of his being. Amid the throes of addiction, Rao discovered that he played an important part in an ancient myth in which his ancestors were struck by a curse. Through drug visions, Rao found transcendental powers to evoke the god Hanuman, from the epic poem the Ramayana. But not the “happy little Hanuman…Mine had fists of ill will and steel wool for fur, and he came from the version of the Ramayana where Rama is a crackhead and Hanuman is his formerly rock-smoking sponsor.” He believed that only the protective powers of Hanuman could release him from drug addiction and the timeless curse passed on by his ancestors. Ultimately he found redemption, and he provides a deft combination of drug-addiction and spiritual-quest memoir.
Unraveling through alleyways, crack houses and treatment centers, Rao's story provocatively blurs the lines between myth and reality.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-073662-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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
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