An intriguingly honest portrayal of an expat’s life-altering personal growth in Asia.
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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