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About Among Flowers: A Walk In The Himalaya
Product Description In this delightful hybrid of a bookpart memoir and part travel journalthe bestselling author takes us deep into the mountains of Nepal with a trio of botanist friends in search of native Himalayan plants that will grow in her Vermont garden. Alighting from a plane in the dramatic Annapurna Valley, the ominous signs of Nepal's Maoist guerrillas are all aroundan alarming presence that accompanies the travelers throughout their trek. Undaunted, the group sets off into the mountains with Sherpas and bearers, entering an exotic world of spectacular landscapes, vertiginous slopes, isolated villages, herds of yaks, and giant rhododendron, thirty feet tall. The landscape and flora and so much else of what Kincaid finds in the Himalayaincluding fruit bats, colorful Buddhist prayer flags, and the hated leeches that plague much of the tripare new to her, and she approaches it all with an acute sense of wonder and a deft eye for detail. In beautiful, introspective prose, Kincaid intertwines the harrowing Maoist encounters with exciting botanical discoveries, fascinating daily details, and lyrical musings on gardens, nature, home, and family. From the Trade Paperback edition. From Publishers Weekly Novelist Kincaid tells of her journey into the foothills of the Himalayas in search of rare plants to bring home to her Vermont garden. Much of the book feels repetitive, in an almost meditative way, as the author uses plain yet lyrical language to record the quotidian details of life in the wilderness. For Kincaid, everything on this trip—eating, sleeping, bathing—requires more effort than usual and sometimes even instills anxiety. Kincaid's details of meals and sleepless nights do grow tedious, and it isn't clear if the author is glad she decided to accompany her botanist friends on their trek, considering the constant threat of leeches and, much worse, the not unlikely (as she portrays it) possibility of losing her life at the hands of anti-American Maoist guerrillas ("Nothing could be more disturbing than sleeping in a village under the control of people who may or may not let you live"). Kincaid's fear never abates: "At some point I stopped making a distinction between the Maoists and the leeches." Occasionally, however, she is overcome with the beauty of the night sky, pilgrim destinations such as a sacred lake in Topke Gola, or the abundant flora, particularly "rhododendrons that were not shrubs, but trees thirty feet tall." This book is as much about a place as it is about overcoming fears and embracing the unfamiliar. Photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Kincaid brings her uniquely heightened sensibility and remarkable ability to evoke with equal vividness both inner and outer worlds to a gripping and poetic account of a life-changing plant-hunting expedition in Nepal. Kincaid, whose earlier plant writings are found in My Garden [Book] (1999), hiked in the Himalaya in the company of American plantsman Daniel Hinkley, husband and wife botanists from Wales, Sherpas, a cook, and ornery porters. Preternaturally observant and piquantly candid, she has an extraordinary facility for capturing the moment; for describing how the sky seems domed at high altitudes; how delicious the simplest of food is when living outdoors; how she copes with the horror of a plague of leeches; how being among these mysterious mountains alters her sense of distance, time, life. To add to the physical arduousness and psychological demands of their long trek was the threat of Maoist guerillas, and Kincaid finds herself astonished by and grateful for everything. "Nothing was as I knew it to be," she writes, and that is the sign of a truly momentous journey. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review "Travel writing at its best." Sunday Times (London) "Count on magic when you read Jamaica Kincaid." Boston Glo
