Maybe the author realized she was getting annoying because she seemed to tone down her attitude in the second half of the book. These probably wouldn't be published today- at least not with these titles and not without a proper editing scrub.
I'm not making apologies, just giving some historical context. Maarten Troost does this in his memoirs too, which were being sold around the same time as this one, and his books in the South Pacific/Micronesia/Melanesia have titles like GETTING STONED WITH SAVAGES and THE SEX LIVES OF CANNIBALS. To be fair, this was the style for comedic travel memoirs of the time. And she does it in a way that definitely can come across as bitchy and condescending.
But as other reviewers have pointed out, there's also a LOT of complaining. She met some incredibly cool people in India who had really interesting stories, like the Zoroastrians and their commune, the woman who got married without permission and was cursed by her mother(!), and the people who did incredible physical feats for religious reasons (I forget why and what they were called, but one guy apparently stood up for two years and one guy lifted his hand in the air for one year- so it was stuff like that). But she ends up tempting fate and going back anyway because she wants to make her relationship work and also because she's curious and the journalist in her hungers for new experiences and stories.Īs I said in my opening paragraph, I really liked the travel parts of the book. She went to India as a young woman and had a bad experience, and then, literally and metaphorically flipped it off, vowing never to return. As a journalist herself who was fond of travel and backpacking, she had mixed feelings. Sarah Macdonald is an Australian who ended up going to India because of her boyfriend's work (I think he's an Australian news reporter). (I would probably vote for ignorant- in the beginning of the book, she talks about her "dreadlocks" phrase in college.)
But on the other hand, this memoir is very dated (published in 2002) with some very outmoded views towards people of color and she takes a decidedly Western slant when talking about said people and culture that oscillates wildly between ignorant and insensitive. On the one hand, it's a memoir about a place I am unlikely to go and it was interesting to see a journalist's take on the people and the culture, since if I can't travel somewhere, it's fun to enjoy it vicariously. I have very mixed feelings about HOLY COW.
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