Light Years - Hardcover

Schreiber, Le Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1558214941 ISBN 13: 9781558214941

Publisher: UNKNO, 1996

Synopsis

The author relates the changes in her perceptions of such things as home, time, and her own past after the deaths of her mother, father, and brother, and describes how she was able to find consolation from unexpected sources

About this title

Review

In 1984, the New York Times Book Review deputy editor Le Anne Schreiber chucked her job and the fast life in Manhattan for an old house on an acre of land in a tiny town in upstate New York. There, she learned to fly fish, and along the way, she outmaneuvered a huge corporation that was dumping sludge near the unspoiled trout stream where she had promised to scatter her dying father's ashes. This book of eight essays is a memoir only in the loosest of terms. Light Years touches on topics ranging from Einstein's theory of relativity to the deaths of her mother, father, and brother, which left her "stripped clean of family." Ultimately, the subject is the achievement of understanding and knowledge in the face of loss. At times, the depth of this slight volume almost seems to be inversely proportional to its length.

From the Publisher

In this searching memoir, Le Anne Schreiber explores the shifts of perspective that accompany a growing intimacy with death. Deeply moving, graced with subtle intelligence and humor, Light Years looks mortality in the eye and stares it down. In the background are three deaths occurring over five years--those of the author's mother, father, and brother. In the foreground are stories of certain simple elements of her life during this period--of a barn cat, impaled by a hunter's arrow, that she patiently nurses back to health; of a trout stream, whose raging waters thwart her attempt to release her father's ashes; of an overgrown acre that stubbornly refuses to be tamed.

Gradually, she traces the impact of these deaths on her understanding of such basic concepts as home, time, and territory, and her own textured past. Searching throughout this remarkable book for this-worldly sources of consolation, she finds them in unexpected places: long swims, a dream, an ancient oak, a book on Einstein, the view from a nearby hilltop.

Light Years bears witness to the shock of death, but even more to a vital and questing inner life, a rare triumph of understanding, and the discovery of vast open horizons, only light years away. This unforgettable memoir is filled with light.

About this edition

• Publisher: UNKNO
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1558214941
• ISBN 13: 9781558214941
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 164