The Memory Eaters, on the other hand, brings us inside New York City’s apartment buildings and hospitals, yoga studios and well-pruned urban parks. Her adventures on glaciers often become what movie reviewers call “nail-biting.” In addition, she drives perilously along a Wyoming-Colorado highway in a blizzard, hikes up a glacier and falls into a deep crevasse, and shows up at Norway’s Bremuseum only a day after it has burned to the ground. In Peterson’s skilled hands, the lyric essays confront difficult truths about the world and retain the fullness of their complexity because they are not over-explicated.ĭispatches from the End of Ice is very much a book about the outdoors, glacial hikes, Nordic boat rides, and Wyoming storms. This author remarks little on her own family and is laconic about her personal story.
On the other hand, Peterson’s essay collection employs first-person narratives as its backbone but focuses chiefly on Norway and Switzerland and such topics as nature, collecting, ecology, and loss. She doesn’t recall her daughter’s name but quips, “Don’t worry, I don’t know my name either.” She memorializes her mother’s modeling career as Boston’s top fashion model in the 1960s, who is depicted sometimes harshly, but also with tenderness. The book returns to a present time in which Kadetsky wrestles with the ethical and financial burden of caring for a mother with Alzheimer’s and a sister suffering from substance abuse. Kadetsky brings us deep into her family’s collective memory, about early ancestors as well as an aunt who dies young and whose mother is an alcoholic. The Memory Eaters won the Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction, and adds to a growing list of books that meld several nonfiction genres-essay, biography, chronicle, and memoir. Both are replete with fascinating microhistories, engaging in what Kadetsky terms, early on, her mother’s “quest for the past.”
Dispatches from the End of Ice by Beth Peterson and The Memory Eaters by Elizabeth Kadetsky look towards Norway, France, and the influence Northern Europe has long had on American thought.
Two wonderfully readable recent books probe the authors’ past losses in order to reimagine their and our futures. Dispatches from the End of Ice by Beth Peterson
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