Elizabeth Farnsworth

When Elizabeth was a nine year old girl, her mother died from cancer, but she was told her mother went away. Not understanding the real meaning she searched at every stop on a train trip she took with her father from Topeka to San Francisco, for her mother. She also imbues this train trip with some imaginative features, tying together memory with imagination.

Alternating with this trip she talks about her later life job as chief correspondent for the Jim Lehrer News hour on PBS. A job that took her to the dangerous hotspots around the world, Haiti, Chile and Allende's run for President. After Pinochet's death she met with the family members, or those who were left, of the disappeared. Iraq after the fall of Saddam. So many dangerous places, places where she felt the world needed to know, places that by exposing what was really going on she could share and show she cared.

The writing, the tone is almost surrealistic, the prose almost poetic at times. Not a straightforward telling but a blend of fact and fantasy. I seem to respond well to books written like this, love the sense of discovery with which they are presented. She does tell us what was real or not about her train trip at book's end. All the pages about her professional life were true. Merging the difficult parts of her life together, one as a young girl, later a professional news correspondent dovetailed nicely, in my opinion, in giving Tue reader a well rounded, of short, glimpse of the, life of this remarkable woman.… (mehr)