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I loved this book. Perhaps we spend too much time in America gathering things rather than experiences with others. How sad that some critique it as yet another self absorbing memoir.
Therefore, I enjoy reading a personal account all the more. Read this book if you've a heart, love of learning about different cultures and have intelligence. One of the most interesting perspectives I gained is how important community and a place of belonging are.
This was such a wonderful read. I am too chicken to do as she does, and I don't have half of her confidence. You will not be dissapointed.
After all it is a memoir about one person's travels; she is not perfect, just human. The countries she visited and lived in (Indonesia, Mexico, Guatamala, Galapagos Islands, etc) are not the places I yearn to go, but her journey was so interesting and she speaks honestly and personably about her experiences and relationships with others, that I was absorbed in her tale.
Each village is filled with warm, wonderful, and generous people. Actually, she seems to slide between her various adventures and returns to the states with very little problem. Not a travel guide, but it might be helpful in searching out what really satisfies you. She makes friends, often instantly, and some become part of her life permanently. She's had it with dining out in the best restaurants and hob-nobbing with the LA entertainment people, though she's interested when her daughter, Jan, is doing the same thing at a ski resort in Colorado. To admit to discontent, and to embrace what brings joy is what Gelman describes in her book.
The book is light and breezy, glib at points. Her experiences in Guatelmala, Nicaragua, the Galápagos Islands, and especially in Indonesia and Bali, where she lived for eight years are vivid and fascinating. Easily read, the book gives readers an inside look at the places the author visits after chucking her life in the United States for mostly Third World destinations.Though she's afraid to go to dinner alone in the first experience, she adapts quickly to living in quarters with a huge black ball of spiders, something I'm not sure I could do. Once in awhile I had the feeling she was perhaps protesting too much--her love of nature and being away from civilization. Serendipity travels with her.Though she tends to use more superlatives than I like, which lowers the credibility level, I enjoyed her travel experiences and the guts it took to have them. (They turned out to be daddy long legs).
Gelman is partly drawn to her destinations because of the ability to live there cheaply.
I wanted to like her, wanted to be empathetic, yet by the end I was cheering her husband for getting away from her. What sounded like a very interesting account of self-discovery ended up being the smug, irritating and self-serving diary of a completely unlikeable woman.
Things improve when she arrives in Indonesia. She adds and drops people, as one does when traveling, but one rarely gets a sense of what it's like to travel with them. Or perhaps it's because she covers so much ground in one book, and doesn't have the space to devote to reporting significant conversations, for example. Nevertheless, it would have been a better book, I suspect, if she'd concentrated more on describing fewer experiences in greater depth. The first chapters seem especially lightweight, as she flits from place to place. To her credit, Rita Golden Gelman began living a life that many of us have just dreamed about.
Perhaps this is because she is the author of children's books, and has developed a simplified style as a result. There's not a lot of sensory input, so it's hard to imagine the look and feel of the places she visits. And she's clearly had numerous experiences that have profoundly changed her. She mentions an affair with a man in the Galapagos, and then never speaks of him again. Then she would have had ample material for the sequel. The problem is that much of this book is written on a relatively superficial level, and doesn't capture the essence of these experiences.
She often just alludes to them.Whatever the reason, the result is frustration for the reader.
Very inspiring. This book is fabulous. It makes me want to just pick up and go like the author.
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