Short essays about the ``alarming speed with which India is changing,'' by an admired novelist (A River Sutra, 1993, etc.). Mehta, born in India before her country gained independence, lived through that period with a child's alert imagination and has been passionately studying the place ever since—although, as she makes plain here, her identity is as much cosmopolitan (with moorings in London and Manhattan) as Indian. While some of these pieces seem too hectic, possessing a heady, dashed-off quality, Mehta's quickness of mind and pen is also her strength. She can plunge us into the intensely remembered girlhood pleasures of reading Nabokov and Kerouac and ``Archie'' comics in Calcutta's impromptu lending libraries. She can precisely catch the differences between a concert audience in India and another in America: ``Art is not just something displayed by the talented to a passive audience,'' she writes, observing an Indian singer, ``but, rather, that moment when the artist, the audience, the subject, the discipline—all combine to become something approaching religious experience, a moment of mutual creation.'' Mehta also tells spirited personal stories of her adventures and researches, such as seeking out ragpickers to find out how they live. She's very good on the ethics of power: ``The most interesting evolution in independent India is the change from individual fearlessness in the face of social and political injustice to craven courting of those who possess social and political power.'' Shrewdly, she avoids generalizing about India, concentrating instead on a wide range of quite specific topics- -e.g., the spiritual meaning of trees to Indians; interior design as a clue to the country's character; the coming of high-tech and shopping malls to the land of Gandhi. Pugnacious in tone and irreverent in critique, Mehta clearly loves her home and is maddened by it. (First serial to Vogue; author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-47495-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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