Some Far and Distant Place

by Jonathan S. Addleton

Overview

Born in Pakistan to Baptist missionaries from rural Georgia, Jonathan S. Addleton crossed the borders of race, culture, class, and religion from an early age. Some Far and Distant Place combines family history, social observation, current events, and deeply personal commentary to tell an unusual coming-of-age story that has as much to do with the intersection of cultures as it does with one man's life.

Whether sharing ice cream with a young Benazir Bhutto or selling gospel tracts at the tomb of a Sufi saint, Addleton provides insightful and sometimes hilarious glimpses into the Muslim-Christian encounter through the eyes of a young child. His narrative is rooted in many unlikely sources, including a southern storytelling tradition, Urdu ghazal, revivalist hymnology, and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. The natural beauty of the Himalayas also leaves a strong and lasting mark, providing solidity in a confusing world that on occasion seems about to tilt out of control.

This clear-eyed, insightful memoir describes an experience that will become increasingly more common as cultures that once seemed remote and distant are no longer confined within the bounds of a single nation-state.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820324586
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	09/30/2002
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

JONATHAN S. ADDLETON was born in Murree, Pakistan. He has a B.S. from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. from Tufts University. Currently Director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Mission to Mongolia, he has also worked as a USAID officer in Pakistan, Yemen, Jordan, South Africa, and Kazakstan.

JONATHAN S. ADDLETON was born in Murree, Pakistan. He has a B.S. from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. from Tufts University. Currently Director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Mission to Mongolia, he has also worked as a USAID officer in Pakistan, Yemen, Jordan, South Africa, and Kazakstan.

Editorial Reviews

This is an important book because it humanizes a place [and] puts flesh and bones on the story.

Michael Stephens

A work to be remembered: its evocation of childhood, of a child's relation to space, is heartbreaking.

Sara Suleri

Addleton does a fine job of recreating his childhood from a young boy's perspective.

Foreign Service Journal

"Splendid reminiscences . . . [Addleton's] memories project a deeply moving warmth and kindness."--Library Journal (starred review)

"Addleton does a fine job of recreating his childhood from a young boy's perspective."--Foreign Service Journal

"A work to be remembered: its evocation of childhood, of a child's relation to space, is heartbreaking."--Sara Suleri

"This is an important book because it humanizes a place [and] puts flesh and bones on the story.”--Michael Stephens

From the Publisher

Born in 1957 in the little town of Murree, in the mountains of northern Pakistan and in sight of the Vale of Kashmir, Addleton (Undermining the Center: The Gulf Migration and Pakistan) is the son of Baptist missionary parents who devoted their lives to saving Muslim souls for Christ. Although he knew their home in Macon, Georgia, only from the three-year furloughs granted them at five-year intervals, he sometimes dreamed of becoming a U.S. president as well as other unlikely American icons. Yet it was the beautiful hills of Sind, the sound of creaking spokeless wooden wheels of the ox carts in the village lanes, the holidays, rituals and daily life of the Muslim community that were his symbols of home until he was sent to college in the United States. Steeped in his family's Christian devotions, he was unaware until much later that his father was frustrated and deeply depressed over what the elder Addleton considered his failure to save many souls. "We have not turned the world upside down as we thought we might. Islam has remained unyielding," his father wrote in his diary. But the missionary became so attached to that Muslim Pakistan where he thought he had failed that he "ached" for it when he was on furlough, preferring it to the "godless and materialistic" United States. His son delves into family history here, drawing a rare picture of the missionary community of his exceptional boyhood and of the colors, simplicities and complications of rural Pakistani culture. He is now back in Pakistan as a U.S. Foreign Service officer with the Agency for International Development. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Born of Baptist missionary parents in Pakistan, Addleton recounts a childhood spent on the parched plains of the Sind and at the Muree Christian School located at an old British Himalayan hill station. These splendid reminiscences embrace his life from birth in 1957 to his graduation from high school in 1975. His descriptions pass from childhood picnics among the ancient digs of an early industrial civilization at Mohenjo Daro to winning a high school basketball tournament in Kabul. Juxtaposed are the extremes of returning on furlough to Georgia to see family members and renew church financial support for the mission. Addleton's attachment to this "distant place" is obvious in his work as a Foreign Service employee with the U.S. Agency for International Development during service in Pakistan, Yemen, Kazakstan, and elsewhere, and his memories project a deeply moving warmth and kindness. Highly recommended.John F. Riddick, Central Michigan Univ. Lib., Mt. Pleasant

Library Journal

Ultimately an appreciation—not without critical reflection—of a formatively marginalizing childhood in Pakistan, by the son of Georgia-born Baptist missionaries.

Addleton, a Foreign Service officer, believes that his defining attitude of "awe mixed with ambiguity" informs his "ability to be partly at home everywhere—but not fully at home anywhere." In Upper Sind, site of his parents' ministry when he was a child, a sense of the eternal prevailed. But only at the Murree Christian School, 700 miles away in the mountains, could Addleton feel part of a collective—of missionary kids who created their own "micro-universe"—rather than like a displaced alien, at home in none of the cultures he straddled—not in Muslim/Hindu society, nor among the Sindhi Christians (street sweepers all, who lived in the busti, or ghetto, with disease and despair). Nor in "what should have been our home," the US, visited on fund-raising furloughs fraught with culture shocks—like the sanitization of death at Forest Lawn ("some sort of first-class waiting room"), which confirmed Addleton's perception that the fragility of life largely eluded the American consciousness. Death, whether from pestilence, accident, or war, was very much at the forefront of existence in Pakistan. For Addleton, it was a source of recurring terrors and a subject of extended contemplation; his psychological resilience today derives from both a philosophical bent for reconciling incongruities and from "the reality of the Living God revealed in Jesus Christ"—his constant since the day in second grade that the Word manifested itself to him.

A slow, earnest, sometimes elegiac reminiscence weighted by a privileged, proprietary perspective on Pakistan, and inflected with unconditional numinousness. Most valuable, however, as the testimony of a missionary kid, a member of "one of the tiniest and most lonely minorities on earth."

Kirkus Reviews