A readable account that gives a vivid taste of life in present-day India as well as a poignant glimpse of complicated family...
Documentary filmmaker Shepard searches for her history deep in the heart of India’s tiny Jewish community.
Growing up in Boston, the author knew that her mother was a Muslim from Pakistan, her father a Christian from Colorado. When she was 13, in 1988, she learned that her grandmother had been born in Bombay, a member of the Bene Israel community, which believes it is one of the lost tribes of Israel. Shortly before Nana’s death in 2000, Shepard promised she would go to India and study her ancestors. Her debut memoir begins 15 months later as she arrived in muggy Bombay to fulfill that promise. The ensuing trip was full of meetings with colorful characters and pensive reflections on identity, community and family. Shepard’s journey through India took place as the world was rocked by the 9/11 attacks, which provided a recurring backdrop to her travels. In the nonlinear narrative of Part One, “Storytelling,” the author dips back in time to recall how her parents met, to talk about her childhood and to examine her grandmother’s influence on the family. Then she settles into “Fieldwork,” a more conventional, chronological documentation of her journey. It throws up a number of intriguing revelations. One member of the Bene Israel community talked openly about the dwindling job opportunities for young Jews in Bombay, partly rectified in recent times by the booming call-center industry. Others seized on Shepard’s ambivalence about religion and advised her to study a faith, preferably Judaism, and pick a partner from that denomination to marry. The author also traveled to Pakistan, where her grandmother and millions of other Indian Muslims moved after Partition in 1948. At Nana’s old flat in Karachi, Shepard discovered a sheaf of her letters; these, together with the stories she told her granddaughter about her past, constitute the book’s most interesting parts.
A readable account that gives a vivid taste of life in present-day India as well as a poignant glimpse of complicated family relations.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-151-6
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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