Review
"[A] wonderful memoir ... Fluidly interspersed within her witty, tongue-in-cheek account of the nutty fellow students and nosy, however well-meaning, Indian spectators are comments and elucidation on second-language acquisition from experts, and observations while visiting a school for the deaf. Homesick, rattled by the violence, Rich nonetheless arrived at making jokes and actually dreaming in Hindi, and in her deft and spirited prose depicts being literally 'possessed by words.'" (Publishers Weekly (starred))
"Rich, with her wonderful journalist's eye, hands over the experience of language and culture so beautifully, it's okay for the rest of us to stay home." (Louisa Ermelino Publishers Weekly)
"In her deftly written memoir, DREAMING IN HINDI, Rich makes us wish we to could come alive in a foreign world, fearless of mistakes, misperceptions and mishaps, and enlivened by the unfamiliar ... a natural journalist, [Rich] gracefully sprinkles reportage about neuroscience and linguistics, as well as her own poignant insights, into her narrative." (Elle)
"Fortified with neuroscience and laced with humor, DREAMING IN HINDI is a crash course in emotional agility, in an understanding too deep for words." (O, The Oprah Magazine)
"…a charming intellectual travelogue, partly about the culture and history of India, partly about the nature of language and language learning, and also, as usual for great travel writing, very much about its author…. ‘I ski Hindi,’ [Rich writes and] elsewhere in the book, she skis psycholinguistics, in long, gleeful conversations in university laboratories and the pages of books and articles; and just about every other language-related discipline gets at least one downhill run as well."
(Mark Liberman Language Log)
"DREAMING IN HINDI: Coming Awake in Another Language…is a riveting memoir about an American woman who spends a year in Rajasthan learning Hindi. The book illuminates the truth that when we learn a language, we learn an entire culture. One of the best foreign observers of contemporary India, Rich's gaze on the country is witty, empathetic, and intimate."
(Suketu Mehta Daily Beast)
"...a work that will inevitably be compared to Elizabeth Gilbert’s "Eat, Pray, Love"...it traces the far-flung adventures of a thoughtful, soul-searching single woman from New York." (Susan Dominus New York Times) About the Author
KATHERINE RUSSELL RICH was the award-winning author of The Red Devil: To Hell with Cancer—and Back. She wrote for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, Slate, and Vogue, and taught writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until her death in 2012 after a nearly quarter-century battle with breast cancer.
