Christine Toomey

Christine Toomey here explores the lives of women around the world—Nepal, India, Burma, Japan, the US, the UK, and France—who are current or former members of Buddhist monastic communities. The sheer number of individual voices to whom Toomey listens here is one of the strengths of the book, but also one of its weaknesses. She covers so much ground in her travels that she inevitably can't spend very long speaking to women in any one place, and I never felt that I got much more than a surface introduction to any of them or to the various strands of Buddhism which they represent. Equally, Toomey never much more than alludes to the deep grief—the loss of both her parents in a relatively short period of time—which spurred her to embark on this journey in the first place. However, Toomey does have a journalist's eye for a vivid image or a telling moment, and I always found the book interesting even if it never quite compelled me.… (mehr)