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In my 50 year career in Asia I never cease to be amazed at the money being made peddling cultural misinformation. I have been gifted the above book by Tessa Feller. This book was written in 2002-2004 and not revised since 2008. There are gross inaccuracies, but they keep reprinting it anyway. Some of the more egregious errors are the result of pure ignorance of Nepali society. My personal favorite is the author's statement "Women are imprisoned for abortion". Abortion has been free and legal in Nepal since 2000. In other words, the author didn't know what she was writing about in 2002, and none of her brilliant editors ever thought to check. I won't detail the author's inaccuracies about the Hindu pantheon. Suffice it to say she has not read anything, who knows where she got this stuff from. Other ludicrous statements concern the status of women. The author was the dependent of an foreign aid worker in Nepal, and was either pregnant or nursing during the 2 years she lived there, so she did not get out much. Many married Western men in developing countries derive sadistic pleasure from telling their wives what slaves women are in their host cultures. Much of the information this author gives about the status of women reproduces what her husband heard in the bar. For instance, she says 3 or 4 times that infertility is grounds for immediate divorce. That this was immensely important to her husband and that it clearly made a big impression on her is clear from her reproductive history. She is obviously unaware that the majority of married Nepali women use modern birth control and are the primary decision makers in re their reproductive capacity and health care. Even though she quotes old WHO/UNICEF reports on education (without giving the publication dates), the statistics she gives are so inaccurate they must be decades old. Most amusingly, she states that in the Nepali home men eat first, children second, and the "women eat the leftovers". She has clearly never been in a Nepali household for a meal, but believed every word her husband heard from his male coworkers. Even the most superficial understanding of Hindu ritual purity would prevent such a statement, which ignores the simple tenets of kitchen/cooking etiquette in Nepali culture. There are lots of GOOD book about Nepal out there, try the library, but don't buy this book. The publishers should be ashamed to put out such nonsense, and keep reprinting it.Read full review
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