A Sense of Direction, Gideon LewisKraus
A Sense of Direction, Gideon LewisKraus
2 Rating(s)
List: $17.50 | Sale: $12.25
Club: $8.75

A Sense of Direction
Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful

Author: Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Narrator: Erik Singer

Unabridged: 11 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 05/10/2012

Synopsis

In medieval times, a pilgrimage gave the average Joe his only break from the daily grind. For Gideon Lewis-Kraus, it promises a different kind of escape. Determined to avoid the kind of constraint that kept his father, a gay rabbi, closeted until midlife, he has moved to anything-goes Berlin. But the surfeit of freedom there has begun to paralyze him, and when a friend extends a drunken invitation to join him on an ancient pilgrimage route across Spain, he grabs his sneakers, glad of the chance to be committed to something and someone. 

Irreverent, moving, hilarious, and thought-provoking, A Sense of Direction is Lewis-Kraus's dazzling riff on the perpetual war between discipline and desire, and its attendant casualties. Across three pilgrimages and many hundreds of miles - the thousand-year-old Camino de Santiago, a solo circuit of eighty-eight Buddhist temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku, and, together with his father and brother, an annual mass migration to the tomb of a famous Hasidic mystic in the Ukraine - he completes an idiosyncratic odyssey to the heart of a family mystery and a human dilemma: How do we come to terms with what has been and what is - and find a way forward, with purpose?

About The Author

Gideon Lewis-Kraus has written for Harper's, The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Wired, McSweeney's, Bookforum, GQ, Slate, and other publications. For the moment he lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews

Goodreads review by switterbug (Betsey) on April 19, 2012

The danger of reviewing a book about a secular essayist who walks the 500 mile Santiago de Camino pilgrimage with a heretic friend, then goes on a longer and more difficult one by himself in Shikoku, then plans another one in the Ukraine with his brother and his Rabbi father (the person who haunts a......more

Goodreads review by Betty-Anne on June 22, 2012

I received an ARC in e-book format from the publisher in exchange for reading and reviewing it. Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes a travel memoir about pilgrimages. He undertakes three very different ones. The first is the Camino de Santiago in Spain, a more traditional style pilgrimage, during which he is a......more

Goodreads review by Tinker on July 02, 2012

i was lent this book by a friend because of its relevance to my recent experiences on the pacific crest trail. after i read it i found online a rather brutal but accurate review of this by choire sicha in slate magazine, to which i have very little to add. pretty transparently, he went on the pilgri......more

Goodreads review by MaryJo on September 29, 2014

I was drawn to this book because of the pilgrimage theme. I went to Santiago a few years ago and saw the pilgrims at the cathedral. A few friends have walked sections of the Camino, and I am fascinated by this as an ongoing practice-however the meanings have changed. I was also curious with this boo......more

Goodreads review by Nicholas on October 28, 2014

Have you ever started eating something, and the first bite you think 'NOTHING HAS EVER BEEN THIS GOOD.' and you immediately eat like, a pound of it, and then, at some point as you're shoveling, you think to yourself 'I may have made a terrible mistake,' but you're already a pound in, so you might as......more

Quotes

“Beautiful, often very funny… Lewis-Kraus weaves a story that is both searching and purposeful, one that forces the reader, like the pilgrim, to value the journey as much as the destination.” –The New Yorker

“Gideon Lewis-Kraus has written a very honest, very smart, very moving book about being young and rootless and even wayward. With great compassion and zeal he gets at the question: why search the world to solve the riddle of your own heart?" –Dave Eggers

“Here is one of the best and most brilliant young writers in America.” –GQ

“A young writer seeks a cure for his fecklessness by following roads very much taken in this scintillating travel memoir… Lewis-Kraus’s vivid descriptive powers and funny, shaggy-dog philosophizing [yield] an entertaining, thoughtful portrait of a slacker caught up in life’s quest for something.” –Publishers Weekly

“Rightfully anticipated literary debut.” –Nylon

“Nail[s] our collective anxiety—every sentence rings true… Lewis-Kraus is a master.” –Daily Beast

“A complicated meditation on what the physical act of pilgrimage can mean in modern society… [with] moments of brilliant philosophical insight.” –The Onion AV Club

“A witty, deeply felt memoir… an honest, incisive grappling with the brute fact… that we only have one life to live… sparkles with tight, nearly aphoristic observations." –The Boston Globe

“Lewis-Kraus does nothing if not dazzle on the sentence level. But his commentary isn't just pretty; it's deeply self-aware.” –The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Gorgeously written… [Lewis-Kraus is] aimless, sure, but meticulously, obsessively, beautifully so.” –The Rumpus

“Physically, Lewis-Kraus’ feats are staggering, but more so is how fully and fluidly he recounts them, alongside meditation on his own youthful anxieties and a well-synthesized history of the act of pilgrimage.” –Booklist

“If David Foster Wallace had written Eat, Pray, Love, it might have come close to approximating the adventures of Gideon Lewis-Kraus. A Sense of Direction is the digressively brilliant and seriously hilarious account of a fellow neurotic's wanderings, and his hard-won lessons in happiness, forgiveness, and international pilgrim fashion.” –Gary Shteyngart“This is a brilliant meditation on what the spiritual and fraternal and paternal and communal might mean to a person right now, fueled as it is by the funny, thorny, dreamy, generous, cranky, rigorous, truth-seeking voice of Gideon Lewis-Kraus.  For the sake of whatever force or idea or feeling sustains you, make a pilgrimage to your nearest bookstore and buy the goddamn book.” –Sam Lipsyte

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List