Author: Stephen Alter
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1998
Language: English
Pages: 319
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0140285520
Description
An American boyhood in the Himalayas. A loving tribute to a unique upbringing.
When Alter is asked the simple question: Who are you from, originally? He hesitates. Although he is in almost every way an American, he has an unexpected reply: My real home was in India, a hill station called Mussoorie, seven and a half thousand feet up the Himalayas. That was where I was born and raised in a section known as Landour...It is a landscape, and a time, that haunts him still.
Every day, Alter straddled the profound boundary between utterly different peoples, cultures, languages and religions. He and his brothers spoke a pidgin dialect of Hindustani and English as young boy. They studied American history but knew more about India's recent independence from England.
In All the Way to Heaven, Alter writes affectionately of his family, his Indian friends and his memories exotic and mundane.
' Alter's vision is both unsparingly realistic and compassionate. He is a sensitive observer with an unusual ability to see a foreign culture from the inside out, making its people alive and compelling...... --THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW