Book gorge

After not reading for awhile, I gorged on books this past week/weekend. I finished Agatha Christie's The Hollow (different plotline than she usually writes off of), then went on to her Tuesday Club Murders (a rare short story collection by Ms. Christie) and Mr. Poirot's Christmas, which I really liked.

Then I read Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski. Wow. So good. I've had it on my to-do list since Stephen King gave it a rave review about a year ago. He had also complained of the drab cover and the publishers have improved on that.

Amazon doesn't have a neutral summary of the book (??) so here's one of the normal people reviewer's summary:

A lot of hard work and research went into this excellent work of historical fiction. It is fiction, as the author reminds us at the end of the book and yet, the characters are so excellently described and brilliant that you could swear that this is a biography. The main character is a dedicated, unselfish, female anthropologist doing work with a tribe of Chinese/Thais in Northern Thailand. We find out early on that she may be involved in a murder and the author painstakingly researches her life and work through interviews with her friends, boyfriends, teachers, the Thai people she is working with and finally, with a family of Christian missionaries who have been involved in missionary work in China since the 30's. The observations about differences in cultures and what it takes for an anthropologist to leave behind pre-conceived notions of God, sprirituality, morality and what makes the world tick, and then enter into a world so different and yet spiritual and religious in its own way, is the real eye opener of the book. The dedicated anthropologists who do this fieldwork have an experience vastly different and scary compared to say a chemist or physicist doing experiments in a lab somewhere here in the US.

We also get a good dose of what the Christian missionaries are trying to do and how their work can sometimes seem somewhat arrogant and un-needed. And yet, to some of the converts, leaving their old belief system and joining a much simpler belief system like "The Good News" of Christianity, can be liberating.

I agree. It definitely puts Christian missionaries in a neutral light which is so rare in novels (I'm talking to you, Poisonwood Bible, grr). It was a fascinating read and I really had a hard time putting the book down. This is the author's first book and he really knocked it out of the park. It is fiction but he was a journalist in Thailand (where most of the plot is based) and really researched anthropology and talked with missionaries.