Dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece (Vintage Departures)

Amazon.com Review For many, Greece is a land lost in time. It conjures up images of the looming Parthenon with its pillars of marble and the timeless whitewashed buildings of its parched islands glinting against a backdrop of the crystal blue Mediterranean. But ask about contemporary Greece and most people draw a blank. In \*Dinner with Persephone\*, poet Patricia Storace does a compelling job of filling in this empty canvas. She conjures a country where history and modernity coexist in often surprising ways, and with the past as an ineluctable backdrop, Storace paints in the everyday details that bring the country and its people vividly to life. From Publishers Weekly A scoop of ice cream decorated with pomegranate seeds is the Persephone of the title?a Greek confection the author orders at a patisserie in Athens where she and a companion stop after a climb to the theater of Dionysus. Her companion chooses a "Leda"?two scoops of vanilla covered with rosettes and studded with tiny paper Greek flags. These are apt symbols of the great past that dominates the everyday life and consciousness of modern Greeks. Like them, Storace smoothly entwines her own daily encounters, during the year she lived in Athens, with the country's history and legends, current politics and neighborhood activities. A prize-winning poet, she has the advantage of a facility with the language, and has access to Greek friends and cultural guides who are often as probing and intellectual as she is. Her journal of that year provides minutely detailed observations, conversations, shopping tours, parties, religious and national holidays, passengers on a bus, street noises, visits to historic spots and even the plots of Greek movies. Though sometimes exasperating in its indiscriminate detail, at the same time the book immerses the reader more deeply than do many other accounts of an American abroad in a vibrant sense of the country's past and present. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. This is a collection of women's travel writings, including work by Joan Didion, Edith Wharton, Mildred Cable, Willa Cather, Isak Dinesen, and others. In wry, lyrical, and sometimes wistful voices, they write of disguising themselves as men for safety, of longing for family left behind or falling in love with people met along the way, and of places as diverse as icy Himalayan passes and dusty American pioneer towns, the darkly wooded Siberian landscape and the lavender-covered hills of Provence. Yet even as their voices, experiences, and paths vary, they share with one another--and with us as readers--reflections upon their gender as it is illuminated by unfamiliar surroundings. Edited and with an Introduction by Mary Morris, in collaboration with Larry O'Connor. Excerpts from: Embassy to Constantinople / Lady Mary Wortley Montagu -- Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark / Mary Wollstonecraft -- Peregrinations of a pariah / Flora Tristan -- Domestic manners of the Americans / Frances Trollope -- Life in prairie land / Eliza Farnham -- Untrodden peaks and unfrequented valleys: a midsummer's ramble in the Dolomites / Amelia Edwards -- Through Algeria / Mabel Sharman Crawford -- Journal of a lady's travels 'round the world / Mrs. F.D. Bridges -- Travels in West Africa / Mary Kingsley -- A lady's life in the Rocky Mountains / Isabella Bird -- The passionate nomad / Isabelle Eberhardt -- Station life in New Zealand / Lady Mary Anne Barker -- A girl's ride in Iceland / Ethel B. Tweedie -- English governess at the Siamese court / Anna Leonowens -- Love among the butterflies / Margaret Fountaine. Desert and the sown / Gertrude Bell -- On sledge and horseback to outcast Siberian lepers / Kate Marsden -- In Morocco / Edith Wharton -- Willa Cather in Europe / W. Cather -- Passenger to Teheran / Vita Sackville West -- My journey to Lhasa / Alexandra David-Neel -- Out of Africa / Isak Dinesen -- Sister of the road / Box-car Bertha -- Farewell Spain / Kate O'Brien -- Nine pounds of luggage / Maud Parrish -- Speak to the earth: Wanderings and reflections among elephants and mountains / Vivienne de Watteville -- Winter in Arabia / Freya Stark -- Black lamb and grey falcon / Rebecca West -- Klee Wyck / Emily Carr -- Gobi desert / Mildred Cable -- West with the night / Beryl Markham -- The cruel way / Ella Millart -- The fabled shore / Rose Macaulay -- Stones of Florence / Mary McCarthy -- A way of seeing / Margaret Meade. Times and places / Emily Hahn -- Long ago in France / M.F.K. Foster -- Tamrart: thirteen days in the Sahara / Eleanor Clark -- Muddling through in Madagascar / Dervla Murphy -- Turkish reflections / Mary Lee Settle -- White album / Joan Didion -- Through Persia in disguise / Sarah Hobson -- Wall-to-wall / Mary Morris -- Travels with fortune: an African adventure / Christina Dodwell -- Russian journal / Andrea Lee -- Demon lover / Robin Morgan -- Season of stones / Helen Winternitz -- Noman's land / Gwendolyn MacEwen -- Teaching a stone to talk / Annie Dillard -- Road through Miyama / Leila Philip

In A Memoir that pierces and delights us, Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthood — a journey that would ultimately span immense distances and encompass worlds, ideas, and ways of life that seem a century apart.

She was seven before she ever saw another girl child. At eight, still too small to mount her horse unaided, she was galloping miles, alone, across Coorain, her parents' thirty thousand windswept, drought-haunted acres in the Australian outback, doing a "man's job" of helping herd the sheep because World War II had taken away the able-bodied men. She loved (and makes us see and feel) the vast unpeopled landscape, beautiful and hostile, whose uncertain weathers tormented the sheep ranchers with conflicting promises of riches and inescapable disaster. She adored (and makes us know) her large-visioned father and her strong, radiant mother, who had gone willingly with him into a pioneering life of loneliness and bone-breaking toil, who seemed miraculously to succeed in creating a warmly sheltering home in the harsh outback, and who, upon her husband's sudden death when Jill was ten, began to slide — bereft of the partnership of work and love that had so utterly fulfilled her — into depression and dependency.

We see Jill, staggered by the loss of her father, catapulted to what seemed another planet — the suburban Sydney of the 1950s and its crowded, noisy, cliquish school life. Then the heady excitement of the University, but with it a yet more demanding course of lessons — Jill embracing new ideas, new possibilities, while at the same time trying to be mother to her mother and resenting it, escaping into drink,pulling herself back, striking a balance. We see her slowly gaining strength, coming into her own emotionally and intellectually -and beginning the joyous love affair that gave wings to her newfound self.

Worlds away from Coorain, in America, Jill Conway became a historian and the first woman president of Smith College. Her story of Coorain and the road from Coorain startles by its passion and evocative power, by its understanding of the ways in which a total, deep-rooted commitment to place — or to a dream — can at once liberate and imprison. It is a story of childhood as both Eden and anguish, and of growing up as a journey toward the difficult life of the free.

Verlyn Klinkenborg

In ''The Road From Coorain,'' one fire starts another. The author's predicament as a woman in Australia becomes a measure of Australia's predicament in the British Empire....''The Road From Coorain'' is the work of a writer who relentlessly tugs at the cultural fences around her until they collapse, leaving her solitary under an immense Australian sky, enlarged to herself at last. What emerges most clearly from this book is the depth of Jill Ker Conway's feeling for ''the unspoken, unanalyzed relationship to the order of creation which governs our psyches at the deepest level''. -- New York Times

In a memoir that pierces and delights us, Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthood—a journey that would ultimately span immense distances and encompass worlds, ideas, and ways of life that seem a century apart.She was seven before she ever saw another girl child. At eight, still too small to mount her horse unaided, she was galloping miles, alone, across Coorain, her parents'thirty thousand windswept, drought-haunted acres in the Australian outback, doing a'man's job'of helping herd the sheep because World War II had taken away the able-bodied men. She loved (and makes us see and feel) the vast unpeopled landscape, beautiful and hostile, whose uncertain weathers tormented the sheep ranchers with conflicting promises of riches and inescapable disaster. She adored (and makes us know) her large-visioned father and her strong, radiant mother, who had gone willingly with him into a pioneering life of loneliness and bone-breaking toil, who seemed miraculously to succeed in creating a warmly sheltering home in the harsh outback, and who, upon her husband's sudden death when Jill was ten, began to slide—bereft of the partnership of work and love that had so utterly fulfilled her—into depression and dependency.We see Jill, staggered by the loss of her father, catapulted to what seemed another planet—the suburban Sydney of the 1950s and its crowded, noisy, cliquish school life. Then the heady excitement of the University, but with it a yet more demanding course of lessons—Jill embracing new ideas, new possibilities, while at the same time trying to be mother to her mother and resenting it, escaping into drink, pulling herself back, striking a balance. We see her slowly gaining strength, coming into her own emotionally and intellectually and beginning the joyous love affair that gave wings to her newfound self.Worlds away from Coorain, in America, Jill Conway became a historian and the first woman president of Smith College. Her story of Coorain and the road from Coorain startles by its passion and evocative power, by its understanding of the ways in which a total, deep-rooted commitment to place—or to a dream—can at once liberate and imprison. It is a story of childhood as both Eden and anguish, and of growing up as a journey toward the difficult life of the free. Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthooda journey that would ultimately span immense distances and encompass worlds, ideas, and ways of life that seem a century apart. She was seven before she ever saw another girl child. At eight, still too small to mount her horse unaided, she was galloping miles, alone, across Coorain, her parents' thirty thousand windswept, drought-haunted acres in the Australian outback, doing a "man's job" of helping herd the sheep because World War II had taken away the able-bodied men. She loved (and makes us see and feel) the vast unpeopled landscape, beautiful and hostile, whose uncertain weathers tormented the sheep ranchers with conflicting promises of riches and inescapable disaster. She adored (and makes us know) her large-visioned father and her strong, radiant mother, who had gone willingly with him into a pioneering life of loneliness and bone-breaking toil, who seemed miraculously to succeed in creating a warmly sheltering home in the harsh outback, and who, upon her husband's sudden death when Jill was ten, began to slidebereft of the partnership of work and love that had so utterly fulfilled herinto depression and dependency. We see Jill, staggered by the loss of her father, catapulted to what seemed another planetthe suburban Sydney of the 1950s and its crowded, noisy, cliquish school life. Then the heady excitement of the University, but with it a yet more demanding course of lessonsJill embracing new ideas, new possibilities, while at the same time trying to be mother to her mother and resenting it, escaping into drink, pulling herself back, striking a balance. We see her slowly gaining strength, coming into her own emotionally and intellectually and beginning the joyous love affair that gave wings to her newfound self. Worlds away from Coorain, in America, Jill Conway became a historian and the first woman president of Smith College. Her story of Coorain and the road from Coorain startles by its passion and evocative power, by its understanding of the ways in which a total, deep-rooted commitment to placeor to a dreamcan at once liberate and imprison. It is a story of childhood as both Eden and anguish, and of growing up as a journey toward the difficult life of the free. This is a collection of women's travel writings, including work by Joan Didion, Edith Wharton, Mildred Cable, Willa Cather, Isak Dinesen, and others. In wry, lyrical, and sometimes wistful voices, they write of disguising themselves as men for safety, of longing for family left behind or falling in love with people met along the way, and of places as diverse as icy Himalayan passes and dusty American pioneer towns, the darkly wooded Siberian landscape and the lavender-covered hills of Provence. Yet even as their voices, experiences, and paths vary, they share with one another--and with us as readers--reflections upon their gender as it is illuminated by unfamiliar surroundings. Edited and with an Introduction by Mary Morris, in collaboration with Larry O'Connor.Contributors and writings include: Mary Wollstonecraft,'Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark'; Flora Tristan,'Peregrinations of a Pariah'; Frances Trollope, from'Domestic Manners of the Americans'; Eliza Farnham, from'Life in Prairie Land'; Isabella Bird, from'A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains'; Margaret Fountaine, from'Love Among the Butterflies'; Gertrude Bell, from'The Desert and the Sown'; Edith Wharton, from'In Morocco'; Willa Cather, from'Willa Cather in Europe'; Isak Dinesen, from'Out of Africa'; Kate O'Brien, from'Farewell Spain'; Rebecca West, from'Black Lamb and Grey Falcon'; Ella Maillart, from'The Cruel Way'; Emily Hahn, from'Times and Places'; M.F.K. Fisher, from'Long Ago in France'; Joan Didion, from'The White Album'; Christina Dodwell, from'Travels with Fortune: An African Adventure'; Annie Dillard, from'Teaching a Stone to Talk'; Gwendolyn MacEwen, from'Noman's Land'.

A thrilling, touching, and densely instructive book, Shooting the Boh is also a frank self-portrait of a woman facing her most corrosive fears—and triumphing over them—with fortitude and unflagging wit. "A captivating and truly offbeat rite of passage."—Eric Hansen.

Publishers Weekly

This story of a journalist joining an expedition down the Boh River starts out as standard adventure travel fare, but the difference rapidly becomes apparent: this journalist is over 40, her luggage is lost on the flight over and cannot be recovered in time, and the expedition has been planned by a company that takes irresponsibility to a new level. Only when they are already on the river do the participants realize how difficult and dangerous their time together will be. All of them must deal with ``insect stress'' caused by bees that feast on human sweat, foot fungus, raging rapids, and perhaps an evil river spirit. On top of that, Johnston begins to have menopausal hot flashes and questions whether it is time to give up the thrill of risky journeys. Her descriptions of both natural phenomena and local customs are lyrical: she compares salespeople in an outdoor market to ``baby birds, mouths open, arms aflutter.'' In writing about the seemingly cursed journey, Johnston keeps her chin up and sticks to what she calls ``the adventure code of travel: go with the unexpected and make do with what you get.'' This engrossing and surprisingly upbeat tale accomplishes much more than that. First serial to Cosmopolitan; QPB selection. (Sept.)

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year "Full of insights, marvelously entertaining . . . haunting and beautifully written." --The New York Review of Books "I lived in Athens, at the intersection of a prostitute and a saint." So begins Patricia Storace's astonishing memoir of her year in Greece. Mixing affection with detachment, rapture with clarity, this American poet perfectly evokes a country delicately balanced between East and West. Whether she is interpreting Hellenic dream books, pop songs, and soap operas, describing breathtakingly beautiful beaches and archaic villages, or braving the crush at a saint's tomb, Storace, winner of the Whiting Award, rewards the reader with informed and sensual insights into Greece's soul. She sees how the country's pride in its past coexists with profound doubts about its place in the modern world. She discovers a world in which past and present engage in a passionate dialogue. Stylish, funny, and erudite, Dinner with Persephone is travel writing elevated to a fine art--and the best book of its kind since Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi. "Splendid. Storace's account of a year in Greece combines past and present, legend and fact, in an unusual and delightful whole. " --Atlantic Monthly From the Trade Paperback edition "I lived in Athens, at the intersection of a prostitute and a saint." So begins this astonishing memoir of fantastical peregrinations throughout Greece. Dinner with Persephone is an indelible masterwork about a place and a people whose culture has influenced us all. With great smartness of style, winning detail, and infectious humor, acclaimed poet and essayist Patricia Storace magically conjures up noisy, anarchic cities and quiet, idyllic towns and harbors, where the unseen worlds of the past - the Roman, the Byzantine, the Ottoman - continue to make their presence felt. She evokes with sympathy and irony the social mores and religious customs and rites of a highly varied and paradoxical people who contentiously affirm their legacy as Greeks but suffer at the same time from profound xenomania - a people fascinated by the dual nature of all things: the transsexual, the biracial, the mother/whore. This beautifully written narrative of Conway's journey from a girlhood on an isolated sheep - farm in the grasslands of Australia to her departure for America (and eventually the presidency of Smith College) is both new and universal. If few of us have known an eight-year drought in New South Wales, many of us have felt the despair of an ambitious young woman facing a edstrained female destiny. This book, an extraordinarily gripping and inspiring work, will take its place as one of the few heroic stories of childhood Memoir of the author's impressions of Greece, combining commentary on history, philosophy, and language with portraits of the countryside and its people, observations on social mores and religious customs, and discussion of how the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman worlds of the past continue to make their presence felt This volume explores the complicated relationship betwee the idea of classical Greece and the messy, Mediterranean reality of a country unsure of its place in the world. Patricia Storace brings to bear on modern Greece a deep knowledge of the classics, of the Greek myths and of Greek Christianity. A woman of intellect and ambition describes growing up on an Australian ranch, coping with her father's death and her mother's depression, her intellectual awakening at the university, and her path to becoming Smith College's first woman president The memoirs of Jill Conway and her journey into adulthood from a 30,000 acre sheep ranch in Coorain, Australia, to America where she became the first woman president of Smith College