An insider’s view of the struggles inherent in any attempt to straddle different cultures.
In her debut, memoirist and anthropologist Enslin writes of her experiences marrying a high-caste Brahman man, giving birth and living with his family on the central plains of Nepal.
While earning her doctorate from Stanford University, the author altered her course after meeting Pramod, a student from Nepal. Originally slated to study African culture for her thesis, she changed her focus to India so that she and Pramod could conduct their anthropology fieldwork together. They briefly visited Nepal to meet his family and then returned to the United States to marry and finish their coursework. After her unexpected pregnancy constrained her fieldwork, Enslin shifted her focus to Nepali women’s political movements. She lived with her in-laws off and on for the next eight years, and cultural differences became tantamount as she was exposed to caste distinctions. Aama, Pramod’s mother, became a central figure in the author’s life, telling stories, creating songs, learning to read, mediating disputes and almost running for political office. She smoothed Enslin’s transition into the family and her new homeland. The author opens a window on a multigenerational rural family, showing how outside tensions and upheaval affect them. With an anthropologist’s eye, she describes weddings, childbirth and women’s gatherings. Her observations have been honed by years of daily chores and family intimacy, and she conveys the difficulties in fitting into her husband’s home and adapting to Nepali culture while earning a doctorate and preparing for the birth of her son. “I remembered my research filtered through a haze of poor planning, pregnancy, sleeplessness, and mild postpartum depression,” she writes. The author also includes a helpful glossary of Nepali words at the end of the book.
An insider’s view of the struggles inherent in any attempt to straddle different cultures.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1580055444
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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