Lost and Found in Mongolia: One Woman's Journey into the Wilderness

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Samantha Borcy

There is a particular kind of courage in deciding, after a life built around credentials and institutions, to get on a horse in the Mongolian steppe and ride until something shifts. Betsy Cooksey had spent a decade as a World Bank economist and run her own consulting firm when her marriage ended and she went looking for something she could not name yet. What she found in Mongolia, across hundreds of miles of open terrain and eight straight days of rain, was less an answer than a reckoning, and Lost and Found in Mongolia is the record of that reckoning told with the honesty it deserves.

The treks Cooksey undertook were not recreational. She signed on for charity rides that required riders to cover up to ten hours in the saddle daily, herding horses and sheep, following nomadic reindeer tribes, and crossing the Gobi in conditions that would have persuaded most people to reconsider the whole enterprise. She kept going, not because she was invincible but because she had decided that the discomfort was the point. Mongolia, she writes, was “so therapeutic I can’t even tell you,” and the memoir does what therapy sometimes cannot: it shows the work rather than just the outcome.

What gives the book its texture is the collision between the world Cooksey came from and the one she rode into. The Mongolian landscape is vast, demanding, and indifferent to professional accomplishment, and she renders it with the eye of someone who had to learn to see it rather than analyze it. The nomadic communities she encountered along the way are drawn with respect and genuine curiosity, never as backdrop for a Western woman’s self-discovery.

Lost and Found in Mongolia is a memoir about grief, reinvention, and the particular freedom that comes from choosing difficulty on your own terms. Cooksey is a clear-eyed and engaging guide, and her journey is one worth taking alongside her.