by Cindy Rasicot ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2020
An intriguingly honest portrayal of an expat’s life-altering personal growth in Asia.
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A memoir of an American woman’s unexpected journey toward spiritual healing in Thailand.
In 2005 debut author Rasicot moved from northern California to Thailand, where her husband, Randall, had accepted a three-year work assignment. In time, the couple and their 13-year-old son, Kris, settled into a new life in an expat community, complete with a live-in maid and the company of other Americans. The novelty of the experience wore off, however, and Rasicot felt aimless as “the initial honeymoon period of being in Thailand had started to fade, and a familiar gray cloud of depression began to envelop me.” She decided to attend a conference on women’s issues in Bangkok, where she met Venerable Dhammananda Bhikkhuni, a Thai college professor–turned–Buddhist nun, who ran a monastery or vihara for women. The author spent time in the monastery, and it set her on the path toward finding what she calls her “authentic self—beyond the prescribed roles of wife and mother.” Raised Jewish, Rasicot learned the ways of Buddhism, interviewed Dhammananda, and reflected on her own life, knowing that soon enough she and her family would return to California. With fewer than 250 pages, the book proves a swift foray into a foreign place, but it’s full of information. Rasicot offers details on everything from living in an expat community (a place where high school students drive golf carts to school) to setting out at dawn on an “alms round” (when monks carrying round bowls receive offerings of rice from donors who believe their act “builds positive karma for this life and the next”). The resulting story is highly personal, with some aspects developed better than others. For all the challenges the author faced, her descriptions of a shopping expedition with her sister are not exactly captivating. Regardless of the subject matter, however, a genuine, unguarded tone permeates the work. Rasicot writes candidly of her disagreements with her husband, of recollections of her mother, and of a lesson she learned from the “Venerable Mother” Dhammananda: “When we go forward with a truly open heart,” she writes, “faith, forgiveness, and love are possible.”
An intriguingly honest portrayal of an expat’s life-altering personal growth in Asia.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-702-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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