Foreign Correspondence
-
-
4.0 • 38 Ratings
-
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
An award-winning memoir from the bestselling author of March and Year of Wonders.
Born in Sydney's western suburbs in the late 1950s, the young Geraldine Brooks longs to discover the vivid places where she believes history and culture are made. Penfriends from the Middle East, France and America offer her the window she craves on life beyond Australia's isolated backyard. With the aid of their letters, Brooks turns her bedroom into the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, the barricades of Parisian student protests and the swampy fields of an embattled kibbutz.
Twenty years later and worlds away from her sheltered girlhood, Brooks is an award-winning foreign correspondent covering war and famine. Still intrigued by the foreign correspondents of her adolescence, she embarks on a human treasure hunt in Israel, France and the US to find them. Brooks discovers men and women whose lives have been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness.
Foreign Correspondence is an intimate, moving and often humorous memoir of growing up in Australia in the 1960s that speaks directly to the heart of everyone who ever yearned to become a citizen of the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Growing up in middle-class Sydney, Australia, Brooks acquired pen pals from all over the world. More than 20 years later, after she became a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, she tracked down a few of them to see "how they had been treated by history...and to get in touch with" the child she herself had been. Brooks relates her search in this competent but unexciting memoir of her youth and what she knew of that of her pen pals. Two of these discoveries stand out: near Tel Aviv, she finds an Israeli who initially doesn't remember writing to her and when he does, he wonders why she has bothered to find him; the other, an Arab, living not far from him, is so warm and outgoing that Brooks feels he has "humanized the Arab world" for her. In New Jersey, she learns that one of her pen pals is dead but is welcomed by her mother; in a village of the Vaucluse, in France, one of her favorite correspondents has become a settled matron; in Manhattan's East Village, she discovers that another has become a nightclub owner. In the end, however, they remain people of more interest to Brooks than to the reader, who may find the journeys more intriguing than the arrivals.
Customer Reviews
Foreign correspondence
Thank you Geraldine for allowing a glimpse of your life and a time in mine to enjoy. Loved the experience - well done. This is the 3rd book of your's I have read. Thank you - Glynis Cogdell 25.3.2013