A chatty, animated American family pilgrimage that effectively conveys the author’s inward search for spiritual meaning.
A family journeys through India and Nepal in this debut travelogue/memoir by a Northern California midwife.
With her acupuncturist husband and two daughters, the author decided to take a journey to India and Nepal. This adventure led the Moes clan to discover ancient wisdom as they traveled through the Indian subcontinent. They went to Bodh Gaya, site of Buddha’s enlightenment, Cochin where they embraced the hugging saint, Amma, and ultimately Ladakh, where they attended the Kalachakra Initiation ceremony conducted by the aging Dalai Lama. The author includes stories from Buddhist-Hindu tradition that augment her own experiences. The husband, Adam, a practicing Buddhist who had been to India before the family’s trip, rediscovered some of the places that revealed their secrets to him previously, but the emphasis remains on the author’s discoveries. Prior to their travels, both the author and her husband had derived their spiritual sustenance from Rainbow Gatherings where they met and fell in love. The origins of their quest for identity reside in hippie theology, an American mix of Eastern mysticism and meditation. “Before enlightenment, cornflakes and coffee,” the author writes, “After enlightenment, cornflakes and coffee.” Sometimes the author’s observations seem a tad precious, but most of her descriptions of teeming city streets, vibrant landscapes, open country, and the delightful variety of many types of Indians and Nepalese enliven her locations and her spiritual searching. A pall hangs over the narrative of the family’s travels, however; before they departed, the state of California launched an investigation into the midwife practices of the author, an investigation whose dread significance memoirist Moes hints at as they travel and whose significance and outcome she finally reveals. As they go, the author also shows the strife between the author and her husband, a domestic rift that threatens to tear the family apart even as they proceed on their long and precarious Eastern journey. Includes black-and-white photos of the family and their travels.
A chatty, animated American family pilgrimage that effectively conveys the author’s inward search for spiritual meaning.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-561-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
PERSPECTIVES
© 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.
