Review by Booklist Review
The year 1987 would find Alexander Frater, chief travel writer for the London Observer,awaiting the arrival of a monsoon in Trivandrum, at India's southernmost tip. While he was a young boy living on the New Hebrides Islands, a framed print of The Wettest Place on Earth hung beside his bed. Steep hillsides, tigers, and temples were pictured, blanketed in all-encompassing sheets of rain. Frater grew to share his father's passion for meteorology, progressing from exultant experiences with local hurricanes, to a thorough fascination with the image of Cherrapunji, Assam, the remote village depicted in the bedside print. Letters written by a family friend confirmed accounts of amazing rainfalls recorded in the fabled town, said to be the Indian monsoon's end point. When the passing of years brought the death of Frater's father, and later, his mother, he decided to follow the monsoon along its northward path. This pilgrimage, of sorts, would culminate in Cherrapunji itself. The adventure was to present one particularly difficult challenge. Political unrest had made Assam off-limits to foreigners, with permission for travel flatly denied. Chasing the Monsoon provides a total immersion in the rich scents and sights of India. Although glimpses of fearsome devastation occur, the overriding theme remains the monsoon's legendary power to rejuvenate and renew life. Readers are promised a thrilling journey. ~--Alice Joyce
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
The monsoon in India is an exalting, inspiring event which heralds the rebirth of greenery. Yet, in chasing the summer monsoon along the coast, journalist Frater ( Stopping-Train in Britain: A Railway Odyssey , LJ 5/1/84) quickly discovers it can turn sinister. The monsoon overpowers technology, bearing disease and floods to an overpopulated land where runoff-preventing asphalt has replaced forests. In his engaging, witty travelog replete with anecdotes and asides, Frater comes to terms with his parents' deaths and learns to accept the Indians' attitude of submission to more powerful forces which, for them, makes the inevitable more bearable. The pleasure of reading this lively book can be enhanced by pairing it with Steve McCurry's spectacular photographic essay Monsoon (Thames & Hudson, dist. by Norton, 1988), which covers other monsoon areas as well as India. For general travel collections. BOMC and Quality Paperback alternates.-- Louise Leonard, Univ. of Florida Libs., Gainesville (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Frater, travel writer for the London Observer, follows India's summer monsoon to the wettest place on Earth in this eccentric, sporadically entertaining exercise in meteorological nostalgia. The son of a Scottish doctor in the South-West Pacific Islands, Frater was brought up with a healthy respect for both the transformations and catastrophes rain could bring. In 1987, shortly after his mother had died and he himself had contracted a numbing nervous disorder, he got the idea to travel to India and experience the legendary summer monsoon, in the vague hope that its reputed rejuvenating powers would lift his own spirits as well. Arriving at the southern tip of the continent to find weather forecasters frantically calculating the moment of the rains' arrival, Frater learned that the tardiness or outright absence of a monsoon--more likely now due to India's shrinking forestland and increased pollution--can potentially topple governments, inspire revolutions, and substantially raise the level of violent crime as citizens broil in the summer heat. This year, luckily, the rains arrived on schedule. Frater joined throngs of monsoon pilgrims on the coastline, greeting the black wall of precipitation with almost religious fervor, then waded north in its fitful wake through Cochin, Goa, Bombay, and Calcutta before ending up on the border of Bangladesh in Cherrapunji, ""the wettest place on Earth,"" where the monsoon made its dramatic last stand. And yet the 1987 monsoon proved disappointing, leaving vast areas of India drought-stricken and leaving Frater, ironically, as perhaps the only person on the subcontinent to have fully enjoyed its moist marvels. An unusual adventure, and a fascinating look at modern India. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
