Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

The title of former GQ writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest book, Eat, Pray, Love, recently out in paperback, would deserve praise simply as a rule to live by. The book is a memoir of Gilbert’s year off from the workaday world at age 34 after a lengthy and depressing divorce. It merits the attention of readers desiring to dig deeper into the worthwhileness of life, and especially of those whose lives have knocked them around enough to make them ask hard questions like: Why? How? With whom? Eat, Pray, Love is divided into three parts relating Gilbert’s four months each in Italy, India and Indonesia. In Italy, Gilbert indulges her love of food and the Italian language; in India, she taps into a need to meditate and deeply know devotion to God; and in Indonesia, she finds the love of a particular man. The book contains gems of wisdom throughout, and as an example she learns in Indonesia that in order to be safe and happy in life, one needs but four virtues: intelligence, friendship, strength and poetry.