BILL PURVES | 31 July 2010The classic groupie memoir involves a rebellious rich kid from the suburbs who gets caught up in a world of sex, drugs and rock and roll and lives to tell the tale. MIMLU SEN fits the wealthy and rebellious stereotype, and her story certainly involves lots of sex and drugs. But forget about rock and roll; Sen is a fan of Indian folk music.
Sen is an upper class Indian from wealthy Kolkata family. She... [ more ]
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
BILL PURVES | 09 July 2010Ordinary lives in North Korea? It seems incredible. How could BARBARA DEMICK, a professional journalist, have researched such a book? Everyone knows that the few visitors permitted are confined to certain parts of Pyongyang and monitored continuously. In fact, Demick was the Seoul or Beijing correspondent of the Los Angeles Times from 2001 to 2006, and during that time she did make nine of those tightly supervised trips to... [ more ]
Burmese Lessons by Karen Connelly
BILL PURVES | 27 June 2010In 2005, KAREN CONNELLY published The Lizard Cage, a debut novel about modern Myanmar which reaped significant critical and commercial success. In researching the novel, Connelly spent much of 1996 in Burma (as she calls it) and in the camps along the border in Thailand housing thousands of Burmese refugees. Thirteen years later, BURMESE LESSONS has now emerged as a memoir of that research tour.
Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler
BILL PURVES | 07 May 2010Fans of PETER HESSLER are in for a treat with the release of his newest, COUNTRY DRIVING: A JOURNEY THROUGH CHINA FROM FARM TO FACTORY. Hessler lived in China almost continuously from 1996 until the big pre-Olympic clearout of foreign residents in 2009. In that time he managed a fair mastery of Putonghua, and from 2001 until 2009 he was The New Yorker's freelance correspondent in Beijing. Country Driving compiles the results of three research projects which originally... [ more ]
Stones into Schools by Greg Mortenson
BILL PURVES | 14 April 2010GREG MORTENSONis the author of the 2006 bestseller Three Cups of Tea.He told there the story of mountain climbing in the Himalayas and coming upon a remote Pakistani village where the residents begged him to help them build a school. Mortensonhad no money, no connections, and no knowledge of construction or education, but he impetuously promised. Three Cups of Tea recounts his long struggle to... [ more ]
Surviving Paradise by Peter Rudiak-Gould
BILL PURVES | 22 March 2010Over the past half-century, America has generated a little literary mini-genre that might be described as "Peace Corps memoirs" describing a new graduate's year or two teaching English in an underdeveloped foreign land. Even Paul Theroux got started with a Peace Corps memoir, and in recent years Peter Hessler's River Town... [ more ]
Cycling Home from Siberia by Rob Lilwall
BILL PURVES | 29 January 2010CYCLING HOME FROM SIBERIA is one of those books where the reader is compelled to learn rather more about the author personally than he really wanted to know. The audacity of the journey, however, makes it pretty compelling reading. ROB LILWALL left a mundane teaching job to cycle from Russia's Pacific coast back home to London, but he was quickly taken by the adventures of the road and turned his journey into a three-year, 35,000 kilometre odyssey... [ more ]
In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labour Camp by Gao Er Tai
BILL PURVES | 19 November 2009HarperCollins has brought out a translation of excerpts from GAO ER TAI's Xunzhao Jiayuan under the title IN SEARCH OF MY HOMELAND: A MEMOIR OF A CHINESE LABOUR CAMP. Hua Cheng in Guangzhou published the full work in 2004 (in simplified characters, alas), but these new translations are a treat for English speaking readers.
Gao is a painter and calligrapher who was born in 1935 at the apex of China's modernization. He lived through the subsequent... [ more ]
