Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal’s Journey from Down Under to All Over - Geraldine Brooks

Written by Geraldine Brooks
Read by Geraldine Brooks
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal’s Journey from Down Under to All Over
Publisher: Bolinda Audio, 2012
Length: 7 hr., 30 min

As a young girl in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longed to discover the places where history happens and culture comes from, so she enlisted pen pals who offered her a window on adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. Twenty years later Brooks, an award-winning foreign correspondent, embarked on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends. She found men and women whose lives had been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness.

Two of these discoveries stand out: near Tel Aviv, she finds an Israeli who initially doesn’t remember writing to her and when he does, he wonders why she has bothered to find him; the other, an Arab, living not far from him, is so warm and outgoing that Brooks feels he has “humanized the Arab world” for her. In New Jersey, she learns that one of her pen pals is dead but is welcomed by her mother; in a village of the Vaucluse, in France, one of her favorite correspondents has become a settled matron; in Manhattan’s East Village, she discovers that another has become a nightclub owner.