A coming-of-age memoir by a young Canadian woman with a literary bent whose three-year sojourn in a Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas challenged her values, changed her religion, and altered her life’s course. In 1988, Zeppa, a graduate student hungry for experience and uncertain about her future, took a two-year teaching job offered by the World University Service of Canada that sent her to eastern Bhutan. The shock of isolation and privation was at first overwhelming, but Zeppa soon fell in love with her new world. Initially posted to the tiny, remote village of Pema Gatshel to teach young children, she was transferred several months later to the campus of Sherubtse College, where her students were closer to her own age and where living conditions were somewhat less primitive. It is here that her idyllic view of the Bhutanese undergoes some refinement. She becomes uncomfortably aware of the country’s political problems, of the lack of personal privacy, and of the extreme pressure for social conformity. Still enthralled by the beauty of Bhutan’s pristine mountain setting and in love with Tshewang, a Bhutanese student (she and her Canadian fiancÇ having long since parted company), Zeppa stays on for a third year. While the early portion of her story is delightful—her enthusiasm for Bhutan and its people is infectious and her descriptions of her encounters with Bhutanese culture are often funny and always enlightening” her account of her relationship with her Bhutanese lover falls flat. The ending seems rushed and unfinished. Her pregnancy and subsequent return to Canada, where her son Pema Dorji is born, her return to Bhutan, her marriage to Tshewang there in 1993, and her return to Canada—all this is compressed into a few pages. An uneven account with many perceptive, lyrical passages.
Pub Date: June 7, 1999
ISBN: 1-57322-118-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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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