The Baltimore Book of the Dead
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“This book is both brief and miraculous, and it will be finished before you’re ready to let it go. Like life.” —Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth
When Cheryl Strayed was asked by The Boston Globe to name a book she finds herself recommending time and again, she chose The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. Now, a decade later, that beloved book has a moving companion volume. The Baltimore Book of the Dead is a new collection of portraits of the dead, weaving an unusual, richly populated memoir of compressed narratives.
Approaching mourning and memory with intimacy, humor, and an eye for the idiosyncratic, the story starts in the 1960s in Marion Winik’s native New Jersey, winds through Austin, Texas, and rural Pennsylvania, and finally settles in her current home of Baltimore.
Winik begins with a portrait of her mother, the Alpha, introducing locales and language around which other stories will orbit: the power of family, home, and love; the pain of loss and the tenderness of nostalgia; the backdrop of nature and public events. From there, she goes on to create a highly personal panorama of the last half century of American life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winik follows her essay collection The Glen Rock Book of the Dead with this unconventional though captivating blend of memoir and biography. It's a slim volume of remembrances of the author's deceased friends and influences who, in one way or another, affected her. Chief among these is her mother, whose chapter is titled "The Alpha," and Winik describes her as believing herself impervious to danger, including getting lung cancer from smoking for 65 years, which is what killed her in 2008. In "The Thin White Duke," Winik writes of being a teenager "with mild gender dysphoria" and being captivated by David Bowie's various personae, while in "The Artist," she recounts taking her daughter to one of Prince's last concerts before his 2016 death. The stories of other people are plucked from the various places the author has lived "The Neatnik," a young software designer who died of uterine cancer in 2013 in Austin, Tex.; two friends' daughters, killed in car accidents in 2008 and 2012 in Texas and Pittsburgh; "El Suegro," her son's late father-in-law, who died from pancreatic cancer. Throughout these understated portraits, Winik writes with a delightfully light and nuanced hand.
