Author Tim Brookes, honored by the New York Times and Booklist as one of the best travel writers in America, is back.Already internationally known as a longtime NPR commentator and the author of the hitchhiking classic A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow, Brookes’s latest travel epic is Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment.
Often hilarious, ultimately profound, Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment begins when Tim Brookes receives a phone call from his editor at National Geographic asking if he’d like to write an article on weather forecasting—an assignment that doesn’t go as forecast.
Brookes, who directs the writing program at Champlain College, embarks on an adventure that starts in a hurricane on an icy mountaintop in New Hampshire and takes him to India to watch the monsoon come ashore and write about the elaborate, almost mystical art of monsoon forecasting. When the rain begins, however, a series of misunderstandings finds him banned from every single office of the India Meteorological Department.
Before long, his journey turns into a cross-country road trip in search of the true meaning of the monsoon—a trip that takes him through the spice villages high in the Western Ghats, to a Hindu wedding at which all the main participants end up drenched, and leaves him ankle-deep in a holy river where the temple elephants bathe. He discovers the history of the umbrella, the bizarre ritual of rain-inducing donkey weddings, and for his erratic and dusty labors, he ends up being rewarded with a glimpse into the spiritual nature of water.
“It’s one of those journeys,” Brookes says, “where you get so deeply enmeshed in the people and the place and the subject that you become slightly insane. You end up having insights that are either signs of genius or signs of madness. Either way, I’ll never think of weather forecasting or water in the same way again.”
The book is (by choice) not available in stores. It’s (by choice) not available on Amazon. You can only order it through Northshire, an independent bookstore in Vermont that Brookes feels strongly about supporting. Click here to order an $18 copy. Click here to read an excerpt from the first chapter.
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