Bowing to Elephants

Starred review from November 15, 2019
This book is recommended by BlueInk Review, a fee-based review service devoted exclusively to self-published books. Booklist is happy to partner with BlueInk to bring you the best self-published titles for adults and youth. Stars reflect the decisions of BlueInk reviewers and editors.In this memoir of self-discovery, Dimond deftly weaves stories of her childhood loneliness and neglect with vivid tales of people she encountered while traveling: the family cook who provided companionship during her year in a Tuscan villa; the ghosts of American prisoners held in Vietnam's notorious Hanoi Hilton; the sad young misfit in frigid Venice who evoked in Dimond feelings of compassion and maternal tenderness. The author employs clean, muscular language and an acute attention to sights, smells, personalities, and spiritual teachings, describing India's sacred Ganges River as blackish green, smelling of old clothes, animals, and garbage, for example, and writing that her alcoholic mother died alone, with a bloated liver, seized up lungs, and an abiding terror. Then she calls upon decades of Buddhist practice for the clarity that gives meaning to such disturbing images. Dimond found the final piece of her self-healing while on an African safari, observing the deep maternal bond elephants share with their young. They broke me wide open, she writes, [... touching ] a timeless and hungry female part of who I was. Readers will relish the journey related in this book worth savoring.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

August 15, 2019
An American woman's trips to foreign lands help her come to terms with a troubled past in this memoir. Dimond, a retired writing professor, juxtaposes scenes from her world travels with fraught episodes from her personal life to tease out hidden resonances. She begins with an account of a three-year teenage sojourn in Italy in the 1950s, during which she contrasts the warmth of the local culture with her chilly relationship with her mother, a free-spirited artist, which left the young author feeling lonely and undervalued. Her adult travels took her to more exotic locales, which she intersperses with more family memories and Buddhist teachings that she adopted in maturity. At one point, for example, a nunnery in Burma evokes recollections of a childhood girlfriend's family who were as welcoming as her own was alienating. A 2013visit to see Ho Chi Minh's miraculously preserved corpse on display in Hanoi takes her back to a similarly hallucinatory acid trip that she had during the 1967 Summer of Love. A 2010 encounter with an elephant herd in Kenya, in which the adult females vigilantly guarded their calves, provokes a recollection of a time in 1966 when she briefly abandoned her husband and 1-year-old daughter for a fling in Las Vegas. She closes with a long, Proustian remembrance of her childhood hometown of San Francisco that takes in bohemian North Beach, the bustling downtown, and the Pacific Heights house where her grandmother led an elegant life that was full of disappointment. The author's loose-limbed narrative moves back and forth in time, telling a tale that's less about specific events than it is about shifting moods in shifting places--sometimes anxious, plaintive or grief-stricken, and other times brimming with interest and wonder. The prose is gorgeous and novelistic, vividly depicting the pitiless African savanna ("Greasy-looking black vultures swooped and hovered and swooped again, pecking away at the sour-smelling carcass; they shrieked nervously") and the mellow ambiance of Florence ("golden light reaching down and blessing an arched doorway, a cloud of cigarette smoke, as children scurried along with their soccer ball"). Much of the book's sensuousness comes from its lavish descriptions of food, from elaborate feasts to a simple egg: "warm and comforting to hold in the palm of your hand, the creamy and sticky richness of the golden yolk, so good you must lick the little egg spoon clean." At its haunted center is a wistful and wounded portrait of Dimond's relationship with her mother, who is a changing landscape in her own right: She was movie-star glamorous in her youth, but the author describes how, in her decline, she had "the ugly wide calloused feet she tried to squeeze into pretty flats, the gnarled hands that she didn't cherish anymore....her lipstick always seemed cracked." Overall, this is not merely an account of strange lands and novel adventures, but also a moving saga of a woman wandering the world in search of home. A luminous, engrossing meditation on family love and loss.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)