What The Reviewers Say

Positive

Based on 11 reviews

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville

Akash Kapur

What The Reviewers Say

Positive

Based on 11 reviews

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville

Akash Kapur

Rave
Amy Waldman,
The New York Times Book Review
This is a haunting, heartbreaking story, deeply researched and lucidly told, with an almost painful emotional honesty—the use of present tense weaving a kind of trance. I kept wanting to read Better to Have Gone because I found it so gripping; I kept wanting not to read it because I found it so upsetting. The image that came to mind, again and again, was of human lives being dashed against the rocks of rigid belief.
Rave
Dan Cryer,
The Boston Globe
... extraordinary.
Positive
Parul Sehgal,
The New York Times
Kapur weaves together memoir, history and ethnography to tell a story of the desire for utopia and the cruelties committed in its name. It’s not an unusual story, perhaps — there’s always been a fine line between utopia and dystopia (see Jonestown) — but it is told with a native son’s fondness, fury, stubborn loyalty, exasperated amusement.
Positive
Allison Arieff,
San Francisco Chronicle
Befitting a book about a spiritual community, this is the tale of the journey as much as the destination. Kapur is a terrific storyteller, and even though you’re told a lot up front, his writing compels you to follow him as he digs deeper. The Mother is, as you’d expect, creepy and compelling, and a sense of foreboding is ever present.
Positive
Tunku Varadarajan,
Wall Street Journal
Akash Kapur’s Better to Have Gone is a haunting and elegant account of this attempt at utopia and of his family’s deep connections to it.
Positive
Katherine A. Powers,
The Star Tribune
The most surprising aspect of Akash Kapur's Better to Have Gone is the author's well-disposed view of the leaders, beliefs and practices of Auroville...[where] Kapur's wife, Auralice, lost her mother to suicide and her adoptive father to a mysterious wasting condition.
Rave
Aatish Taseer,
Air Mail
[A] beautiful but devastating book.
Rave
Barbara Bamberger Scott,
Bookreporter
An eerie mystery wrapped in Eastern mysticism is at the heart of this intriguing examination by journalist Akash Kapur.
Positive
Margaret Quamme,
Booklist
... [a] moving, complex combination of history both social and personal.
Rave
Publishers Weekly
... an enlightening look at how a well-meaning utopian community in India became complicated by reality.
Positive
Kirkus
Melding history, biography, and memoir, the author offers a sensitive examination of Auroville’s complex origins, tumultuous evolution.