Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan

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As a teacher of English literature, Jamie Zeppa would understand how the story of her journey into Bhutan could be fit into the convenient box of "coming-of-age romance," a romance with a landscape, a people, a religion, and a dark, irresistible student. An innocent, young Catholic woman from a Canadian mining town who had "never been anywhere," Zeppa signed up for a two-year stint teaching in a remote corner of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Despite the initial shock of material privation and such minor inconveniences as giardia, boils, and leeches, Zeppa felt herself growing into the vast spaces of simplicity that opened up beyond the clutter of modern life. Alongside her burgeoning enchantment, a parallel realization that all was not right in Shangri-La arose, especially after her transfer to a college campus charged with the politics of ethnic division. Still she maintained her center by devouring the library's Buddhist tracts and persevering in an increasingly fruitful meditation practice. When the time came for her to leave, she had undergone a personal transformation and found herself caught between two worlds that were incompatible and mutually incomprehensible. Zeppa's candid, witty account is a spiritual memoir, a travel diary, and, more than anything, a romance that retraces the vicissitudes of ineluctable passion. --Brian Bruya

Book Description

In the tradition of Iron and Silk and Touch the Dragon, Jamie Zeppa’s memoir of her years in Bhutan is the story of a young woman’s self-discovery in a foreign land. It is also the exciting début of a new voice in travel writing.

When she left for the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan in 1988, Zeppa was committing herself to two years of teaching and a daunting new experience. A week on a Caribbean beach had been her only previous trip outside Canada; Bhutan was on the other side of the world, one of the most isolated countries in the world known as the last Shangri-La, where little had changed in centuries and visits by foreigners were restricted. Clinging to her bags full of chocolate, hair conditioner and Immodium, she began the biggest challenge of her life, with no idea she would fall in love with the country and with a Bhutanese man, end up spending nine years in Bhutan, and begin a literary career with her account of this transformative journey.

At her first posting in a remote village of eastern Bhutan, she is plunged into an overwhelmingly different culture with squalid Third World conditions and an impossible language. Her house has rats and fleas and she refuses to eat the local food, fearing the rampant deadly infections her overly protective grandfather warned her about. Gradually, however, her fear vanishes. She adjusts, begins to laugh, and is captivated by the pristine mountain scenery and the kind students in her grade 2 class. She also begins to discover for herself the spiritual serenity of Buddhism.

A transfer to the government college of Sherubtse, where the housing conditions are comparatively luxurious and the students closer to her own age, gives her a deeper awareness of Bhutan’s challenges: the lack of personal privacy, the pressure to conform, and the political tensions. However, her connection to Bhutan intensifies when she falls in love with a student, Tshewang, and finds herself pregnant. After a brief sojourn in Canada to give birth to her son, Pema Dorji, she marries Tshewang and makes Bhutan her home for another four years.

Zeppa’s personal essay about her culture shock on arriving in Bhutan won the 1996 CBC/Saturday Night literary competition and appeared in the magazine. She flew home to accept the prize, where people encouraged her to pursue her writing. Her letters from Bhutan also featured on CBC’s Morningside. The book that grew out of this has been published in Canada and the United States to ecstatic reviews, followed by British, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish editions.

Although cultural differences finally separated Jamie and Tshewang in 1997 while she was writing the book and she returned to Canada, she will always feel at home in Bhutan. Zeppa shares her compelling insights into this land and culture, but Beyond the Sky and the Earth is more than a travel book. With rich, spellbinding prose and bright humour, it describes a personal journey in which Zeppa acquires a deeper understanding of what it means to leave one’s home behind, and undergoes a spiritual transformation.

Customer Reviews:

Not what I thought it would be.......2007-07-30

This is a travel memoir, but it reads as much more of a personal journey. She goes from the western world into an isolated eastern world that is also very poor. She learns and learns, sometimes is very naive, sometimes very wise. Where she ends up was a surprise to me.

EXTRAORDINARY, WELL-WRITTEN STORY.......2007-06-25

After reading some of the other reviews for this book, I was hestant to purchase it. But after traveling to Bhutan, a friend highly recommended this book. Zeppa's story is an extraordinarily well-written account of a westerner's time teaching in Bhutan. Her descriptions of the Bhutanese landscape alone are worth the read. There are few books that I read twice, and this will soon be one of them!

A JOY.......2007-05-21

Whether you are interested in travel, anthropology, religion this a charming read for all. Insiteful and skillfuly written. I've given it to five friends and all enjoyed it equally.

Loved it!.......2007-04-14

This book will leave you thinking about it long after you've read it. I thought the author's transformation throughout her experience was so interesting to read about. I was disappointd that she didn't give more info about how her relationship with her lover ended because she had been so thorough about how they fell in love. Otherwise, it was a great book. I learned a lot about Bhutan's culture (I had never even heard of this country before I read the book.) and have recommended this book to other friends and colleagues.

answered questions about Bhutan.......2007-02-13

I found this book fascinating. It gave insight to how teaching in Bhutan changed the author's life.Well written, will pass it on to friends.

Beyond the Sky and the Earth A Journey into Bhutan

Average customer rating:

Weaves a difficult thread
One of her Best--and I've Read Them All!
Brilliant subtlety
Brookner Strikes Again
boring!

Beyond the Sky and the Earth A Journey into Bhutan
Jamie Zeppa
Manufacturer: Doubleday Canada Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Bhutan | Asia | Travel | Subjects | Books

General | Asia | Travel | Subjects | Books

General | Travel | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0385256930

Book Description

In 1989, Jamie Zeppa, a naïve, well-educated twenty-three-year-old from Sault Ste. Marie, commits to a two-year teaching contract in Bhutan against the wishes of both her fiancé, Robert, and her controlling grandfather. Following orientation here and in Bhutan, Jamie is unceremoniously dropped at a remote Bhutanese village to teach Grade Two. There, she battles fleas, landslides, rats, kerosene stoves, leeches, and illness, and believes she will not survive two weeks, let alone two years.

With help from her eight-year-old students, Jamie overcomes her culture shock and fear, makes some friends, and soon begins her love affair with Bhutan. She writes letters home full of wonder and discovery--of the country, of herself, and of Buddhism.

As she spends more time in this strange and beautiful country, Jamie finds herself attracted to one of her college students, Tshewang, with whom she eventually has a child and marries.

Like Karen Connelly's Touch the Dragon, Beyond the Sky and the Earth is the compelling story of a Westerner trying to fit in to an alien culture, and trying to bridge cultural and political divides that may be insurmountable.

The doors of Paro airport are thrown open to the winds. The little building with its single stripe of tarmac is set in the middle of dun-coloured fields dotted with mounds of manure. The fields are carved into undulating terraces edged with sun-bleached grass; intricate footpaths lead to large houses, white with dark wooden trim. A young girl in an ankle-length orange and yellow dress, two horses, three cows, a crow in a leafless willow tree. An ice-blue river splashing over smooth white stones. A wooden cantilever bridge. Above the bridge, on a promontory, a massive fortress, its thick white walls tapering towards the top, a golden spire flashing on the dark red roof.

My bags are lying alone on the tarmac outside, beneath furiously snapping flags. I haul them in. I have arrived.

Customer Reviews:

Weaves a difficult thread.......2005-09-30

This is the first Anita Brookner book I have read, and even though I was entranced by the story line, I found the sentence structure long and rambling. Ms. Brookner weaves her thoughts with a difficult warp. Her repetitive return to previously covered subjects left me often wondering if something had changed...didn't I read about this before. Sometimes I felt it was too rambling and ended up skipping whole paragraphs just to avoid the trackless thoughts. Even though she has won prior awards, Ms. Brookner might want to think about getting a new editor.

One of her Best--and I've Read Them All!.......2000-08-14

An editor of mine once said to me that he didn't think a wholelot happened in an Anita Brookner novel. "It's like somebody takes a painting off the wall and contemplates the patch of wallpaper that hasn't faded. That's the book."

He was right--and he was very wrong.

Lives in Brookner's novels almost always follow the same arc as that wallpaper--from bright possibility to faded reality, and her characters are struck by the contrast of hopeful past and dim present. That is, the characters she most sympathizes with. Because in Brookner's world, there are the quiet, compliant, resigned types (who sometimes long to be bolder), and then there are brash heedless people who like FitzGerald's Daisy and Tom Buchanan smash things and people because they don't care what others think.

The painful and sometimes humiliating interaction of these two types is the source of the drama. Brookner's often compared to Henry James, and like James, she posits that adventures of consciousness, travels of the mind and heart, are as strange and threatening as any other trips we might make.

Brookner's newest novel, her seventeenth, is a gloriously moving example of her insight into this paradox, written as always in witty and crystalline prose, and with her usual poetic psychological precision.

Dorothea May grew up very quietly in a London suburb, and it shaped her values: "One ate plain food, was careful not to give offence, and stayed at home until one married." This outwardly sedate spinster's life--in which trips to Europe were as uneventful as trips to the library--was interrupted by an accidental meeting that lead to a happy fifteen-year marriage. But when her husband Henry died, Dorothea slipped back into the silence and virtual isolation she had been so accustomed to. While she had dearly loved her husband, when she at last got rid of his things, she "felt a sort of elation on realizing that in the future she would not be disturbed."

Well-off at seventy, in reasonably good health, but fighting recognition of her body's growing frailty, she's also profoundly aware of "approaching the end of life, and that silence was appropriate." Brookner captures the sustaining rituals of Dorothea's narrowed life with heartbreaking and at times comic accuracy. While her own family is gone, she does have rich in-laws left, and doesn't really mind providing them with a conversational "diversion" due to her perceived oddness.

These same in-laws--careful to phone her every week to check on her health, but never coming much closer--disrupt the reverie-filled life she's sunken into. Her sister-in-law's granddaughter has decided to come back to London from Massachusetts to get married, and Dorothea is pressured to offer her hospitality to the best man. The idea of a stranger in her home is appalling, but Dorothea can't say no to this surprising request.

Until now, she has been "moving through her shadowy rooms undisturbed, as though she were her own ghost." But the presence of a houseguest who is young and somewhat opaque to her, along with the oncoming wedding and the immersion in the present, is enough to change her life. That change is Jamesian: Dorothea comes to see her childhood, her parents, her marriage, her one brief affair in a completely new light. She emerges radiant with understanding, and can heroically face growing old: "the country without maps." It's an almost breathtaking series of insights and discoveries, and Visitors is that rare book: a literary page-turner.

Brookner's great gifts as a novelist are on lavish display in Visitors. Few authors can communicate as deftly and subtly as she can the shocking passage of time, or the baffling way friends can drift apart, and the quiet lies and evasions of family life. What's most amazing is that the quality of her work has been so consistently high year after year. If you haven't read any of her novels, Visitors is a wonderful introduction to one of our best and most consistently enjoyable contemporary novelists.

Lev Raphael, author of LITTLE MISS EVIL, 4th in the Nick Hoffman series...

Brilliant subtlety.......2000-03-16

In an age when most novels deal with issues in the heavy handed rhetoric of psychotherapy, it is a joy to see Brookner filter her observations with such subtelty and taste. And when most editors mandate that their authors "dramatize" every scene with clunky dialogue (as if we were children and could not get the message any other way!), I found it a meditative pleasure to read a novel so deeply steeped in a character's inner life. Yet, when dialogue appears, it is flawless.

Brookner is a supremely subtle writer. For example, many of Thea's differences with her husband's cousins are due to the fact that she is a gentile who married into a close-knit family of Jews. Yet, the word "Jew" never apears once. She manages to handle the issue delicately, without offending anyone, grinding an axe or drawing too much attention it.

It was an enlightening change to see life through the eyes of a seventy-year old, and unlike some of Brookner's novels, this book had a gently upbeat ending.

Brookner Strikes Again.......1999-12-03

In the reclusive and sensitive Mrs. May, Anita Brookner has created a character of utterly memorable proportions. Though no one is allowed behind the high walls of her inner world, the reader is invited to spend a week there: the impressions of this experience stick. Brookner's prose is flat but fertile, a golden plain that rustles in the breeze and is ripe for harvest. And other characters frequent these pages: the young as viewed from the treetops of age; the old and their shifting grasp on life; the dead exhumed and examined in the light. And all cry out to be heard, some with a genteel wave of the hand, others with self-satisified, irritated shouts. To know Mrs. May, one must begin to think the way she does, and perhaps this is the real brilliance of this novel: one is given a roadmap to her mind and urged to use it. It is difficult to believe that the "visitors" themselves could be as oafish as they are; this novel is also a meditation on the smiling thoughtlessness of youth. Age, too, must undergo rigorous cross-examination in the courtroom of this book, and the testimony given makes fascinating reading. Brookner is so smooth, so pleasant to imbibe, that one forgets she is a complex and sophisticated drink. Don't let the readability of "Visitors" fool you; this novel is fun, but hardly kidstuff.

boring!.......1999-06-12

This was a huge disappointment after Hotel du Lac. Though I sympathized w/ Thea, I couldn't relate to any of the other characters. Thanks, but no thanks - I'll pass on all the other Brookner "novels."

Book Description

An original collection of essays by leading international Soviet cinema scholars, covering seventy years of cinema history, providing a clear understanding of the aesthetic developments and sociopolitical function of Sovie

The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema. (book reviews): An article from: Canadian Journal of History

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The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema. (book reviews): An article from: Canadian Journal of History
Thomas J. Saunders
Manufacturer: University of Saskatchewan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Russia | History | Subjects | Books

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Canadian Journal of History, published by University of Saskatchewan on April 1, 1995. The length of the article is 3475 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema. (book reviews)
Author: Thomas J. Saunders
Publication: Canadian Journal of History (Refereed)
Date: April 1, 1995
Publisher: University of Saskatchewan
Volume: v30 Issue: n1 Page: p85(8)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Amazon.com

Packed with reproductions of album covers, advertisements, book covers, and fashion shots from the swinging side of the early '60s, this book is a visual delight. Every effort has been made to give this volume the feel of the era it fetishizes. Even the background colors are chosen from the Technicolor palette of the bachelor dream pad. Perhaps most impressive is the collection of novelties and knickknacks, including "gag" cocktail napkins, old bowling trophies, a light-up bow tie, and the requisite bongo drums. It's a crazy trip to weirdsville, Daddy-o ... or something.

Book Description

His old man liked a stiff drink and a close shave, but he drives a convertible and has a tiki bar in his closet. He wears a shiny pegged-leg suit and takes chicks back to his pad. He's cool, he's urbane, he's glib, he's copacetic. He's a cross between James Bond and James T. Kirk, all wrapped up into one smooth-talking, cocktail-mixing package. The swinging space-age bachelor is back! and more prepared than ever with this classic guide. Illustrated with original artifacts and commercial relics from the Beat era and beyond, this very classy little volume offers a hilarious glimpse into the evolution of the modern man-about-town.

Customer Reviews:

Pseudo-hip observations, an uneven collage of trivia.......2003-11-17

Extremely thin in both observation and inspiration, this celebration of the '60's bachelor male is like an extended booklet for one of the CD's in the Ultra-Lounge catalogue. Colorful, yes, and initially fun, but leaving no lasting impressions. I liked the paperback book covers, the hip records, the naughty napkins, but the book falls short on exploring drinks and music--which should've been the focus of the piece. Instead, we get a tiki section (with grass skirt ads!) and a chapter on the Beatnik movement. Bachelors in the 1960's were self-appointed suburban kings, not pot-smoking guys in berets who listened to Lenny Bruce (those were KIDS, not bachelor men). Therefore, the bongos and the hippies are just wasted space in what should've been a much more precise and engaging look at a specific genre.

Taste Filling Less Great.......2000-08-16

This book looks great and has tons of photos- it is an enjoyable collection of eye candy. Do not expect any new info from this one. The text describes what the author might imagine this time was like, instead of alowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.

This books shows us just how LAME the modern male is!.......2000-01-28

This super cool little book is full of the coolest vintage "guy stuff"! Man, I wish life was still that GONE! This book will have any normal,red-blooded hipster lookin' for a time machine so he can get his but back to the crazy days of cocktails and girl chasin'! Oh lord how the 2000's seem like they are gonna be LAME compared to those wild days. Please get me out of here and back to the NORMAL, techno music free past...PLEASE!

Only the shape of the book is square, man........1998-05-11

One can go through the entire book first only absorbing the pictures, and then once again to get the stories behind the culture. I am a post-modern graphic design major, and found this book invaluable in studying this by-gone, but needs-to-be-ressurected era.

Book Description

In this witty little book, Arthur Okamura fashions paper frogs that actually jump, uses a mirror to draw a magical star, and shows how to unpeel a sliced banana. Ideal for office, outings, car rides, and picnics, this book makes anyone an instant magician.

Book Description

"Color Confidence is one book that no photographer, especially me, can afford to be without!"
Art Morris, Photographer (www.birdsasart.com)

Establishing a successful color management workflow that produces predictable results is an important -- yet tricky -- undertaking. Most photographers are all too familiar with the frustration of a print not matching the image on the monitor. In Color Confidence, digital imaging expert Tim Grey provides the crucial information you need to get the color you want, every time.

His results-oriented guide shows you how to manage color effectively across all devices. He demystifies complicated topics and takes you through each component of a color-managed workflow step-by-step.

Designed for busy photographers, this full-color guide cuts through the theory, focusing on the practical information you need to make the best color decisions from capture to output.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent book.......2007-08-08

This is the best book that I have used on this subject. Clear explanations, illustrations, etc.

Excellent.......2007-06-16

A really very useful book that explains a complex subject about as clearly as you could hope for. Covers a great range of topics beyond color management. I highly recommend this book.

Good book if you are searching for a step by step guide........2007-01-25

I was really disapointed by the book. I wanted something that would have been closer to the theories and technicals aspects of color profiles. This is mainly a step by step book to follow with specific software (or even hardware) to reach some goal. It is very software and hardware specific - not generic. I learned more about "how color profiles works together" on websites than in the book.

Much Needed Book.......2006-06-19

Digital photographers don't pay enough attention to color management. This book is exactly what is needed to remedy that lack. You'll find all the basics here, and enough in-depth information to start you on the road to calibrating and fine-tuning your digital equipment to accurately reproduce the colors you see.

Just What You need.......2006-01-06

This is exactly what I was looking for; it gives a quick in-and-out overview of colour management, with detailed information about calibration and profiles. Other books on this topic are twice the size, which I don't think is necessary for most people.

It goes into very good detail, with task-by-task instructions, and is well-organised and clear (One reviewer claims that it was "poorly edited and conceived"; I didn't have any of the problems they did).

Color Confidence The Digital Photographer's Guide to Color Management

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Color Confidence The Digital Photographer's Guide to Color Management
Tim Grey
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000N7G55O

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