A Mother's World: Journeys of the Heart (Travelers' Tales Guides) - Softcover

3.91

11 ratings by Goodreads

9781885211262: A Mother's World: Journeys of the Heart (Travelers' Tales Guides)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1885211260 ISBN 13: 9781885211262

Publisher: Travelers' Tales, 2000

Mother's World illuminates what it means to be a mother on the road, and aims to dispels the notion that motherhood and travel are incompatible. '

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Review:

Of the advantages of traveling as women, the editors write, "We can go to almost any country in the world and look another woman in the eye and not be intimidated or intimidating." The universality of mothers, being them and having them, is a bond that domesticates the farthest reaches of the planet. The 30 essays by women travelers collected here bear witness that, unlike many of their male counterparts, even the most adventurous women never outrun the ties that both bind and sustain them. It is only incidentally a book that tells you how to travel with infants or aging relatives, but one that recounts the emotional rewards available to those who do.

Reportage of the internal landscape is at least as much the point here as capturing the smells or the qualities of light in a foreign land. The best of these pieces--such as Tricia Pearsall's "Altitude Adjustment," which is about a mother's solo wilderness camping in preparation for the emptying of her nest, or Wendy Dutton's "The Places I Went When My Mother Was Dying"--make the metaphors of movement through geography and of movement on the birth-death axis mutually reflective in a genuinely moving way. The quality of writing and clarity of vision vary considerably among the 30 writers represented here. Some pieces barely transcend the What I Did Last Summer genre, or fall prey to maternal sentimentality. Still, a book that collects the testimony of observant women on the move is a cause for celebration, not least because it should enfranchise and inspire more.

From Publishers Weekly:

This latest addition to Bond and Michael's Traveler's Tales series is a collection of 30 essays, some previously published and others original. Varying in interest and competence, each piece recounts the experience of traveling with a child or a parent. With the exception of Colin Bear, who writes about visiting his adoptive mother's relatives in Alaska ("Mama Bear"), all the authors are women. Some of the journeys, like Joyce Wilson's trip to Egypt with her mother ("Christmas in Cairo"), are to faraway locales, while other selections describe neighborhood jaunts, such as New Yorker Christine Loomis's account of a day spent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her three-year-old daughter. The essays collectively touch upon a variety of topics. Louise Erdrich, in an excerpt from her The Blue Jay's Dance, marvels at how a bird's nest makes her aware of the need to let her children go. Cherilyn Parsons ("Mother to the World") details her feelings while nursing very ill children at Mother Teresa's Calcutta orphanage. Altogether, this combination of traveling and caretaking is a moving reminder of the nature of love's bonds.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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