Falling into Place

Reviews / Votes

Doing the work one was meant to do and finding the person one was meant to spend a life with are journeys in every sense of the word. To get to the job, an entry-level assignment for a Trenton newspaper, Swick traversed long distances through his state's most scenic countryside. To reach Hania, his beloved, a young Polish beauty whose U.S. visa had expired, Swick crossed multiple Eastern European borders at a time when the region was undergoing significant cultural and political unrest. Nothing in his childhood in small-town New Jersey in the 1950s or as a liberal arts college student in the 1970s prepared him for either pursuit or for his self-motivated desire to study the masters of travel writing. Although he amassed an impressive library of legendary writers in the genre, it was his own innate skill, curiosity, and sense of the noteworthy that enabled him to immerse himself in the Polish language and culture as he reunited with Hania. Swick, who would forge a career as a prolific travel writer and editor, keenly and empathically observes the world, bringing both a relatably human approach and learned appreciation for the art of travel and of life. * Booklist, Starred Review * Falling into Place is such a pleasure to read from beginning to end. Tom Swick has made his living as a travel writer, but in these pages he shows he's as insightful traveling inside the interior of his life as in the world at large, evoking the universal in the particular in both journeys. -- David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe It's difficult to classify Thomas Swick's Falling into Place. Is it a travelogue? A love story? A Cold War history? It is all of these, and more. Swick's evocative, often humorous narrative. takes us on a journey behind the Iron Curtain, and deep into the ineffable recesses of the human heart. A true delight. -- Eric Weiner, author of the New York Times bestseller The Geography of Bliss Thomas Swick's memoir, Falling into Place, memorably recounts the confluence of two extraordinary states: the author's own literate, romantic youth and that of Poland at the moment Communism gave way to Solidarity in the 1980s. Travel itself, emerges as the great love and lodestar of this exceptionally well-written bilungsroman: Without the author's burning desire to see the world, readers wouldn't have the opportunity to observe one of the great geopolitical movements of the late 20th century through the eyes of a young writer. -- Pamela Petro, author of The Long Field, Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir