The Lonely Other

Reviews / Votes

[NOT PROOFED] "By telling tales that are both self-deprecating and deliciously human, George directs us to the discoveries available when one abandons standard operating procedure and lights out for the territory ahead." -- Georgia Review "Like Annie Dillard and Kathleen Norris, George explores self and place and the connections between the two... Combining natural, cultural and personal history, these essays are infused with a sense of being on the road... When the landscape prevails and George unrehearsedly reaches outside herself to embrace her fears and wounds in a quest for 'mindful living,' the essays transcend solipsistic memoir." -- Publishers Weekly "Diane Hume George's The Lonely Other is a book of travel essays like no other. Here is America the beautiful, the ugly, the crazy, the hopeless and awesome--urban and wilderness, Yellowstone and Wounded Knee and Almogordo, a porn parlor in Times Square and the Trappist monastery in Kentucky where Thomas Merton lived and worked, and much, much more. These are the adventures of a woman in her prime, walking the lonesome valley of our land by herself and with others. It is the reader's enormous good fortune that Diana Hume George is not only a lover of the road but a stunningly excellent writer." -- Alicia Ostriker, Rutgers University [COV] "Introspective, humorous, confrontational, compassionate and invariably honest, George addresses the human condition from the point of view of a committed feminist." -- Maxine Kumin "Offers new levels of understanding of all kinds of landscapes--physical, political, emotional, and spiritual. With intelligence, grace, and wry humor, Diana Hume George honors and celebrates the complex truths of a woman's journey and indeed her life." -- Barbara Findlen, executive editor, Ms. From a Trappist monastery to a Washington political rally, from a Times Square peep show to a Rocky Mountain sheep ranch, from Yosemite in the West to the White Mountains in the East, Diana Hume George marches on--sometimes literally with her knees bandaged. Always she wonders: Can women learn to travel alone, on roads and in their daily lives, without fear? In "Wounded Chevy at Wounded Knee" (Best of the Best American Essays [1994]) George recounts how she lived a trapped and futile life as a white teenage bride on an Indian reservation. But in adulthood she discovers that she can overcome fear with decisive action. She confronts drunken hunters outside her isolated cabin; she faces her fear of heights by climbing in the White Mountains; she unflinchingly delves into her long-standing engagement with Anne Sexton's poetry, and into her own father's suicide. George's book chronicles the sublime seasoned amply with the absurd and the ironic. Even her "Postscript" is at once utterly implausible and absolutely predictable, just another day in the life of a woman constantly facing new amazements. [NOT PROOFED] "Diana Hume George ... has written a compelling book of travel essays, an American woman's 'on the road' chronicle... George is a beguiling story-teller. Her writing is gritty but graceful, funny but soul-searching, full of erudition and good common sense. She takes us on many an instructive adventure ... and she vividly records the fears and joys of a woman alone in the wild... With The Lonely Other, George makes a lively, intelligent contribution of the burgeoning genre of women's travel and nature writing." -- Deborah Tall, Ms. Magazine