Penguin Random House SEA offers two exciting tomes that take us to different places outside the world and in our heads and hearts.
Wild Wisdom and Kopi Dulu are memoirs written with skill and flair, that tackle the themes of individuality and adventure in exciting and interesting ways.
Wild Wisdom
Christine Amour-Levar is a French-Swiss-Filipina entrepreneur who established two non-profit organizations, Women on a Mission (WOAM) and HER Planet Earth. Over the past ten years, she has taken hundreds of women from all over the world to places such as Bhutan, Ethiopia, and Rwanda to “support and empower women affected by [violence] via [their] advocacy work and fundraising.”
In Chapters 1 and 2 of Wild Wisdom, Amour-Levar gives us a brief background of her childhood and current life. Born to an expat father and Filipina mother of the prominent Araneta clan, she grew up in the Philippines in privilege and affluence. However, her mother made sure to teach her compassion and kindness for others. Nineteen of the 22 chapters take the reader to a particular place to relive with Christine the adventures she and her team had there, as well as the life lessons they learned.
After a successful career in advertising and marketing in Japan and the U.S., Amour-Levar left corporate to fulfill a mission that burned in her heart – to uplift the plight of women and girls around the world suffering human rights violations. She also raises funds for other women- and gender-related charities.
In Chapter 12, Christine tells how she led a WOAM team to Mongolia in 2018 with 14 women from Singapore to raise $100,000 for women survivors of war. They journeyed to a remote area where they met a group of nomadic Kazakh Eagle Hunters. The WOAM team stayed in one of their homes, a traditional ger or circular tent of felt and skins.
“These resilient people,” Amour-Levar writes, “are the remnant of a disappearing culture that has survived for ages, mostly in harsh, isolated conditions.” The expedition team members are taken on horseback rides across the steppe – “I will never forget the incredible sense of freedom I felt when riding in the Altai Mountains. It was a heady combination of adventure, exhilaration, and deep relaxation.”
Among the many insights Amour-Levar shares are how the greatest achievements of her teams “came in the face of the greatest adversity, and that true growth and resilience comes only from challenge, from persevering, from having grit, from stepping away from what is comfortable, and having the courage to step out into the unknown.”
Wild Wisdom is an engrossing memoir, a narration of women’s adventures and the self-discoveries made when women come together in sisterhood and solidarity for a cause.
Kopi Dulu
If writer Mark Eveleigh could only travel in one country for the rest of his life, he would choose Indonesia. That’s how much this British-born writer has come to love the land that’s been described as “the world’s most invisible country.”
In six action-packed chapters of Kopi Dulu (literally “coffee first” in Bahasa), readers are treated to wonderfully detailed narratives of culture, place, and society, of the kind that anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “thick description.”
In Chapter 1, “Sumatran Blend,” Mark recounts the time he caught a five-foot-long monitor lizard with a towel while drunk, pulled 72 leeches off his legs in a single morning of trekking, and roasted garlic bulbs on glowing coals as food seasoning and garlic repellent. And that’s just in the first few pages! He goes on to tell of his many other adventures in Sumatra, including getting “addicted” to ‘bandrek,’ a hot drink made of ginger, cinnamon, palm sugar, condensed milk, and raw egg.
In Chapter 2, “Java Jolt,” Eveleigh arrives at midnight at the port town of Merak, where he is immediately ripped off by a ‘becak’ (like a tri-sikad) driver who charges him above the usual rate to take him to his hotel just across the plaza. Mark travels to Krakatoa, which killed over 36,000 people when it blew its top in 1883. “As we started up the slope,” he recounts, “I realized that I was walking almost on tiptoes – holding my breath, as if trying not to awaken the sleeping giant.”
The four other chapters are just as exciting and full of detail that make the narrative come alive.
Kopi Dulu was launched online last September 24. When I asked Mark why the coffee theme for his book, he replied, “For me, it’s a catchphrase of the country – ‘Take it easy, you don’t need to rush.’ It’s also the feeling of the hospitality of the country.” He adds he feels “safer in an Indonesian village than I would in a Western city.”
What’s his number one takeaway? “There are so many places I want to see in more depth,” Mark said. “On every little island in Indonesia, there is always something fascinating there, there’s so much to see…You couldn’t make up the kinds of stories you hear in the small communities in Indonesia.”
Eveleigh added that this book is a “tribute to the Indonesian people, who have always shown so much generosity in my journeys through their remarkable country.”
From Penguin Random House SEA:
Kopi Dulu: Caffeine-Fuelled Travels Through Indonesia
By Mark Eveleigh
2022, 392 pgs, pb
Wild Wisdom: Life Lessons from Leading Teams to Some of the Most Inhospitable Places in the World
By Christine Amour-Levar
2022, 234 pgs, pb
Dr. Ortuoste teaches communication and creative writing. She is a board member of the Philippine Center of International PEN and a member of the Manila Critics Circle that established the National Book Awards. You may reach the author on Facebook and Twitter: @DrJennyO
