Description:
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.
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