To the male guides who accompanied Henriette d’Angeville as she stubbornly reached the summit of Mont Blanc in 1838, her achievement marked a turning point in mountaineering history. Henriette’s accomplishment helped to break through the age-long belief that the “fairer sex” could not endure the strenuous activity of mountain climbing nor could their “weaker constitutions” survive in harsh climates and thin, oxygen-depleted environments. Although Henriette’s achievement on Mont Blanc is today little-known, societal perceptions of what women could achieve in the outdoors began to crumble in the nineteenth century.
Retracing his past through the labyrinth of old Liverpool, Jeff Young has conjured a book of plangent beauty and longing. Ghost Town is in essence a memoir, but within its short span it contains multitudes: a meditation on loss, a family album, an ode to the power of reading, a loving memorial to a city, and a long goodbye.
The Prophets is indeed an outstanding novel, delivering tender, close-up intimacy, but also a great sweep of history. The novel names chapters after books of the Bible, but what really frames it are poetic sections written in the mysterious, eternal voices of seven ancestors, speaking out from the darkness.
Grant died in 1986, in the midst of a cross-country tour called “A Conversation with Cary Grant.” He had been hosting a series of Q-and-A sessions with fans in smaller cities, places that would not usually see visits from such a Hollywood legend. At the time, Grant was finally opening up and accepting himself, little by little. The journey of self-discovery took his entire life. Whether he ultimately found solace, we will never truly know, but this fine biography gets us as close as we have ever been to seeing Grant whole.