Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Â  Â  Â  Â 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.Â ,Â  Â  Â  Â 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?Â 
Travel,Nonfiction,Autobiography,Memoir,Biography,Cultural,Spain,Travel,Walking,Biography Memoir,Adventure,Cultural,Germany,Cultural,Japan
A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful