A charming, knockabout travelogue and meditation on the 1970s international yoga scene.
A debut memoir chronicles a young man’s journey to learn yoga and see the world.
Brandão was a 23-year-old yoga instructor in Brazil in 1976 when he decided to further his studies with a six-month training session at the Yoga Institute in Mumbai, India. The first part of his narrative is an atmospheric account of his voyage there on a cargo ship through rough weather—“Moving up to the top of a large wave….One has the impression that the hull will not be able to resist the impact and the ship will break in half”—and the dank monotony of maritime life. He was then bowled over by India’s color, bustle, and poverty; its chaotic streets full of vehicles and livestock; and its haughty, corrupt bureaucrats who hassled him endlessly about his travel documents. At the Yoga Institute, devoted to the teachings of founding guru Shri Yogendra, the author found an oasis of calm and learning. Brandão draws piquant thumbnails of students and teachers along with evocative scenes of yoga procedural. (“Seated on the floor with legs crossed and eyes closed, I feel my entire body expand and gain volume in an unusual way, as if I were turning into a giant that weighed tons.”) The final section of his memoir covers his ensuing overland trip by train, bus, and ferry from India to Wales, much of it an odyssey of grand sights, squalid accommodations, and gastrointestinal crises, including an emergency pit stop in Iran during which the bus drove off, leaving him stranded with no money, luggage, or passport. Writing in brisk, limpid prose based on his travel diaries, Brandão’s book keeps his picaresque adventures low-key. He’s raptly attuned to the physical and cultural adjustments he had to make as a stranger in strange lands, but he also enlarges his focus by twining in brief, digestible meditations on yogic philosophy. (“Attachment, that terrible killjoy, comes camouflaged in a great variety of guises and prevents our living to the full….We delude ourselves into believing that we are in control when, in reality, we are but passengers in transit through this life, and nothing actually belongs to us.”) The result is an exuberant and engaging fish-out-of-water story that’s a bit more thought-provoking than the norm.
A charming, knockabout travelogue and meditation on the 1970s international yoga scene.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72839-368-1
Page Count: 244
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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