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Cargando... Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains -- a Homeward Adventure (edición 2004)por Christopher S. Wren (Autor)
Información de la obraWalking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains -- a Homeward Adventure por Christopher S. Wren
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Moral of the story - you can still do stuff even when you are 65. This is a pretty interesting and totally enjoyable read, but Wren does go into old man rants throughout the book. ( ) I picked this one up as part of my preparations for an upcoming trip to Vermont. Unfortunately, since Wren was walking to Vermont, there wasn't really much of the state in the book. However, I did end up enjoying it. Wren is a retiring journalist - a foreign correspondent - for the New York Times, and decides to literally walk into his retirement. He is walking from his apartment in NYC to his house in Vermont. This involved walking through the city and its suburbs and then walking part of the Appalachian Trail. Throughout the book, Wren reflects on his experiences as a foreign correspondent, comparing moments in current time with the past. It was really interesting to read his stories. I also liked his descriptions of all the excesses of Americans, which rang true. Especially enjoyed this this tidbit he added: The Chinese describe such excess as "drawing a snake and adding feet." But sometimes, he definitely came off as entirely "you kids get off my lawn!" I.e., that crotchety old man you want to avoid. (Though I can't say I'm not getting there myself!) Even though this didn't really have much to do with Vermont, I'm glad I picked it up. I need to read more books about the Appalachian Trail (and the Pacific Crest Trail, the West Cost equivalent). Quotes I liked: - I slept no worse than anyone else might after trudging eleven miles over mountains, downing three beers, grilled salmon, a chicken quesadilla, and a banana pudding pie, then stretching out on a queen-size inner-spring mattress in a darkened room in front of C-SPAN. (p111) - Food writers can be a pretentious, irritating lot, and no more so than when they disparage chocolate desserts as sinful or decadent. Sin and decadence are words that define the human condition, not desserts. Sinful? Dropping poison gas on the Kurds when you're the despot of Iraq is sinful. Decadent? Ordering forty-dollar entrees and sixty-dollar bottles of wine in an exclusive restaurant in Manhattan is decadent, when the less privileged are sleeping on the grates outside. Chocolate is merely delicious, and what's the sin in that? (p121) - Today, American-style adolescence remains a luxury that much of the world still cannot afford. (p198) - Nostalgia's flaw is its selectivity. (p266) At age 65, Chris Wren ended his career one day and started his journey from New York to Vermont the next. This is the story of a world news journalist who finally took the time to explore his own country by walking the Appalachian Trail. A blend of observations about his age and current perspectives along with news anecdotes, this is a philosophical essay that is a reflection of Henry Thoreau's values. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
A distinguished former foreign correspondent embraces retirement by setting out alone on foot for nearly four hundred miles, and explores a side of America nearly as exotic as the locales from which he once filed. Traveling with an unwieldy pack and a keen curiosity, Christopher Wren bids farewell to the New York Times newsroom in midtown Manhattan and saunters up Broadway, through Harlem, the Bronx, and the affluent New York suburbs of Westchester and Putnam Counties. As his trek takes him into the Housatonic River Valley of Connecticut, the Berkshires of Massachusetts, the Green Mountains of Vermont, and along a bucolic riverbank in New Hampshire, the strenuous challenges become as much emotional as physical. Wren loses his way in a suburban thicket of million-dollar mansions, dodges speeding motorists, seeks serenity at a convent, shivers through a rainy night among Shaker ruins, camps in a stranger's backyard, panhandles cookies and water from a good samaritan, absorbs the lore of the Appalachian and Long Trails, sweats up and down mountains, and lands in a hospital emergency room. Struggling under the weight of a fifty-pound pack, he gripes, "We might grow less addicted to stuff if everything we bought had to be carried on our backs." He hangs out with fellow wanderers named Old Rabbit, Flash, Gatorman, Stray Dog, and Buzzard, and learns gratitude from the anonymous charity of trail angels. His rite of passage into retirement, with its heat and dust and blisters galore, evokes vivid reminiscences of earlier risks taken, sometimes at gunpoint, during his years spent reporting from Russia, China, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa. He loses track of time, waking with the sun, stopping to eat when hunger gnaws, and camping under starry skies that transform the nights of solitude. For all the self-inflicted hardship, he reports, "In fact, I felt pretty good." Wren has woven an intensely personal story that is candid and often downright hilarious. As Vermont turns from a destination into a state of mind, he concludes, "I had stumbled upon the secret of how utterly irrelevant chronological age is." This book, from the author of the acclaimed bestseller The Cat Who Covered the World, will delight not just hikers, walkers, and other lovers of the outdoors, but also anyone who contemplates retirement, wonders about foreign correspondents, or relishes a lively, off-beat adventure, even when it unfolds close to home. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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