Thomas Cook has always been drawn to dark places, for the powerful emotions they evoke and for what we can learn from them. These lessons are often unexpected and sometimes profoundly intimate, but they are never straightforward.
With his wife and daughter, Cook travels across the globe in search of darkness—from Lourdes to Ghana, from San Francisco to Verdun, from the monumental, mechanized horror of Auschwitz to the intimate personal grief of a shrine to dead infants in Kamukura, Japan. Along the way he reflects on what these sites may teach us, not only about human history, but about our own personal histories.
During the course of a lifetime of traveling to some of earth's most tragic locals, from the leper colony on Molokai to ground zero at Hiroshima, he finds not only darkness, but a light that can illuminate the darkness within each of us. Written in vivid prose, this is at once a personal memoir of exploration (both external and internal) and a strangely heartening look at the radiance and optimism that may be found at the very heart of darkness.
Thomas Cook has always been drawn to dark places, for the powerful emotions they evoke and for what we can learn from them. These lessons are often unexpected and sometimes profoundly intimate, but they are never straightforward.
With his wife and daughter, Cook travels across the globe in search of darkness—from Lourdes to Ghana, from San Francisco to Verdun, from the monumental, mechanized horror of Auschwitz to the intimate personal grief of a shrine to dead infants in Kamukura, Japan. Along the way he reflects on what these sites may teach us, not only about human history, but about our own personal histories.
During the course of a lifetime of traveling to some of earth's most tragic locals, from the leper colony on Molokai to ground zero at Hiroshima, he finds not only darkness, but a light that can illuminate the darkness within each of us. Written in vivid prose, this is at once a personal memoir of exploration (both external and internal) and a strangely heartening look at the radiance and optimism that may be found at the very heart of darkness.
Thomas H. Cook is best known as a hugely popular crime novelist. He is the winner of the Edgar Award for The Chatham School Affair and has been shortlisted for the CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger and the Anthony Award. He divides his time between Cape Cod and Los Angeles. This is his first work of nonfiction.
“Perhaps the season’s most unlikely narrative turn. As Cook’s
journeys accumulate, a reader loses any trepidation about
approaching these sites of sorrow, awakening instead to Cook’s main
purpose as the narrative acquires a humble gravitas. Cook promises
that ‘there is much to be gained where much has been lost, and we
deny ourselves that bounty at the peril of our souls,’ a truth to
which this surprising volume attests.”
*New York Times Book Review*
“Cook doesn’t reach for moral lessons in the awful past; instead
they emerge tacitly from signs of life and compassion he discovers
in the present. The result is a gripping exploration of how hope
sprouts from despair.”
*Publishers Weekly*
“Engrossing and insightful.”
*Kirkus Reviews*
“Cook writes movingly, perceptively, fulfilling his assertion that
'there is much to be gained where much has been lost.'”
*Irish Times*
“A fascinating, troubling memoir from a fine writer.”
*Mick Herron*
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