Rich in local color and lore, an evocative introduction to a unique way of life.
A young woman from the matrilineal Moso culture describes her upbringing in one of China’s most distinctive minorities, assisted by an American anthropologist.
The Moso people live in the foothills of the Himalayas and ethnically resemble the neighboring Tibetans more than the Chinese. They are Buddhists but also worship their own gods, who are honored at annual festivals. Women do not marry but instead freely choose a succession of men to father their children. Men live with their mothers and only visit other women, who in turn rely on their male relatives and children to help run their households. Practicing what is called “walking marriage,” the Moso are described by Mathieu in an afterword as “the only people in the world who consider marriage an attack on the family.” Namu was her mother's third daughter; each had a different father. She vividly details village life: women work the fields while men herd the yaks; a “Skirt Ceremony” marks a girl’s arrival into womanhood; and at her grandmother’s burial a straw figure wearing a beautiful dress was put on a decorated horse and paraded around the village to represent the soul’s last ride. Born in 1966, Namu recalls the arrival of the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution; finding the diet and the climate too daunting, they soon left. (The communist authorities have been similarly unsuccessful in imposing monogamy on the region.) At 16, Namu was chosen to sing in a competition that took her to Beijing. Briefly back home, passionately responding to her boyfriend’s embraces but fearing that pregnancy would end her dreams, she ran away and won a scholarship to the prestigious Shanghai Conservatory. Her mother broke up her room with an ax and burned the contents, but they reconciled on a subsequent visit. Though she had to live in the wider world, Namu writes, “We both knew now that I would always come back.”
Rich in local color and lore, an evocative introduction to a unique way of life.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-12471-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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