A Train through Time: A Life, Real and Imagined

by Elizabeth Farnsworth, Mark Serr (Illustrator)

Overview

"It has been a long time since I read a book so moving, plainspoken, and beautiful." --Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Moonglow

How much of our memory is constructed by imagination? And how does memory shape our lives? As a nine-year-old, Elizabeth Farnsworth struggled to understand the loss of her mother. On a cross-country trip with her father, the heartsick child searches for her mother at train stations along the way. Even more, she confronts mysteries: death, time, and a locked compartment on the train.

Weaving a child's experiences with memories from reporting in danger zones like Cambodia and Iraq, Farnsworth explores how she came to cover mass death and disaster. While she never breaks the tone of a curious investigator, she easily moves between her nine-year-old self and the experienced journalist. She openly confronts the impact of her childhood on the route her life has taken. And, as she provides one beautifully crafted depiction after another, we share her journey, coming to know the acclaimed reporter as she discovers herself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619026018
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	02/13/2018
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	951,214
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 5.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Farnsworth is a filmmaker, foreign correspondent, and former chief correspondent and principal substitute anchor of PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. She has reported from Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile, Haiti, Iraq, and Iran, among other places, and has received three Emmy nominations and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for A Train Through Time

"A moving and vivid account into what drove this accomplished journalist into the darkest corners of humanity . . . Like all good memoirs, A Train Through Time offers the reader an opportunity to 'ride along' with an intelligent and reflective narrator as she inventories her life and offers us an insider's view of some of the most morally challenging moments in our country's history." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Elizabeth Farnsworth has created a magic potion of prose that has both the deep rhythms and cadences of poetry . . . It is a small jewel of graceful writing, insightful observing and memorable reading that will live in the mind of readers forever." --Jim Lehrer

"It has been a long time since I read a book so moving, plainspoken, and beautiful." --Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Moonglow

"A story of courage and compassion, longing and love. A polished gem, like nothing I've ever read before." --Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Treasure and A Really Good Day

"Filmmaker and PBS foreign correspondent Farnsworth packs a life's worth of pain and self-discovery into a slim memoir that fuses fiction and memory . . . The scenes of destruction abroad are chillingly real . . . She's such an able storyteller and her tale of loss, suffused with a child's desire to attach meaning and reasoning to death, is so universal." --Publishers Weekly

"In this book, Elizabeth Farnsworth lays bare the genesis of the caring heart that has so infused her stellar reporting. In flashbacks and leaps forward, in fact and fantasy, she takes the reader on a journey that opens up her personal and professional world in a way that is both heartbreaking and heartwarming. It is a unique perspective that deserves to be read by anyone who cares about the news and is curious about someone who does it so well." --Charlayne Hunter-Gault, recipient of a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcast journalism, and author of In My Place

"In her intensely personal book, A Train Through Time: A Life Real and Imagined, journalist and filmmaker Elizabeth Farnsworth, formerly of PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, combines historical and emotional fact with a bit of fiction to paint a portrait that captures her childhood and also her professional life." --San Francisco Chronicle

"A unique, moving, and thought-provoking portrait of Elizabeth Farnsworth's years as a foreign correspondent, beautifully layered with a potent reimagining of the loss she suffered in childhood, one part of her life speaking to the other, answering and assuaging, bringing a long-sought understanding of the pull war zones and conflicts exerted on her." --Linda Spalding, author of The Purchase

"From Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, and other outposts of human danger and devastation, famed NewsHour television journalist, Elizabeth Farnsworth, brought home tragic news. Yet, as a nine-year-old girl, young Elizabeth faced a tragic loss of her own. In this riveting book, we meet a brave, questing child, teddy bear under arm, facing the edge of the unbearable, and a highly compassionate adult, seeking to know and help a wounded world. Brilliant. Unforgettable. Healing." --Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

"In this haunting combination of a reporter's memories and the imagination of a bereaved child, Elizabeth Farnsworth seamlessly weaves together two different, but not entirely disparate, aspects of her life. The result is a deeply moving piece of literature quite unlike any other I have read." --Adam Hochschild, author of Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39

From the Publisher

12/05/2016
Filmmaker and PBS foreign correspondent Farnsworth packs a life’s worth of pain and self-discovery into a slim memoir that fuses fiction and memory. The narrative shifts between a train trip nine-year-old Farnsworth took with her father in 1953 (from Topeka to San Francisco, following the death of her mother) and various conflict zones the adult Farnsworth covered as a journalist, from Chile on the brink of the coup in the 1970s to Iraq in 2003. The scenes of destruction abroad are chillingly real—Farnsworth describes, in haunting detail, meeting Chilean parents whose children were “disappeared” by Pinochet’s regime and likely met grisly ends—but she admits at the very end of the book that the train journey is largely a product of her imagination, a way for her to explore the deep sense of loss she still carries for her mother. In her narrative, the train becomes stranded in the snow for days and she and another little girl learn that a famous horse is on board and get to ride it. Readers will forgive Farnsworth’s admission that she “didn’t resist the imagining when it began” only because she’s such an able storyteller and her tale of loss, suffused with a child’s desire to attach meaning and reasoning to death, is so universal. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

2016-10-31
Filmmaker and former PBS foreign correspondent Farnsworth makes her literary debut in an impressionistic memoir that moves back and forth through time from her childhood in Topeka, Kansas, to her work in "conflicted places" such as Cambodia, Chile, Haiti, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam.The narrative also moves in and out of reality and imagination: as the author reveals in the last pages of the book, one of the surreal childhood events she narrates never happened. Her mother's death, though, did occur, when she was 9, and the loss was shattering. Although Farnsworth knew her mother was suffering, her father told her that her mother was "gone," leading her to hope that she would return. Shortly after her death, Farnsworth and her father traveled by train to California to visit relatives, and the child searched for her mother every time the train stopped. In her dramatic rendering of the trip, their train becomes stranded in an avalanche in the Sierra Mountains, and she finds a white stallion, cared for by a cowboy, being transported to Los Angeles to perform in a TV series. These invented scenes—the author riding the powerful horse through the train's cars and the train's peril, which had occurred the year before—emphasize her emotional vulnerability at the time. Although the episode felt to her "as if it actually happened," it confuses the narrative. Real peril occurred repeatedly in her work: she reports interviewing mothers of "disappeared" children in Chile; discovering that Nixon and Kissinger acted to undermine Allende and bolster Pinochet; interviewing leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood after 9/11; fearing for the safety of her crew while reporting from Israel and the West Bank; and reflecting on the morality of news reporting. "I don't believe I have the right to decide what story is worth another person's life," she concludes. Piecing together fragments of the past in this often moving memoir helps the author understand how she "found relief from self and sorrow by concentrating on the lives of others."

Kirkus Reviews