An outsider’s infusion of significance and structure into a world that would be beautiful, if only he allowed it to speak...
Bamana’s travel book explores the nomadic pastoralism of Mongolia through its residents’ relationship with tea.
In his debut, Bamana sets out on a journey with the single-minded purpose of seeking out the Tea Road—the trade route between China and Western Russia that passed through Mongolia beginning in the 17th century—and visiting locals along the way, thereby soaking up traditional Mongolian culture through the lens of its tea practices. The book bumps along with him, dusted with some sketchy, impressionistic Mongolian history and sociology and musings on the country’s globalization. He presents some compelling insights into the nomadic culture of Mongolia, and, of course, tea. For instance, the matron of the family typically starts each morning in the ger, or yurt, by boiling milk tea for her family and offering a delicate libation to honor the deities of nature by sprinkling tea in the four cardinal directions. It’s an elegant concept, but Bamana’s lens overexposes what he sees, and readers are left longing for a more grounded experience. The guiding principle of the book is metaphor—tea is catalyst, symbol and vehicle—but the abstraction leaves readers never feeling quite anchored, never fully present, which is crucial for a travel narrative. There’s an adventure in there somewhere, but the author mostly glosses over it to get to the parts about tea. It’s also difficult to get over Bamana’s tendency, in certain instances, to present his observations or casual interviews as hard fact. There are some moments of inspiration when he loses himself in the sublimity of his surroundings—an enchanting description of the unique bounding of time and seemingly endless space on the steppes; a reflection on Mongolian spirituality, of nature as a portal to the sacred. He should allow himself to become distracted more often. In general, Bamana’s devotion to his theme takes him on a roundabout path that ends by describing the prosaic with unnecessary complexity.
An outsider’s infusion of significance and structure into a world that would be beautiful, if only he allowed it to speak for itself.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461009580
Page Count: 218
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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