Sara Mansfield Taber

a personal journey that takes the reader through recent history providing a different perspective -- that of a child, an adolescent and then an adult who lived through the events of the era closer than many of us and influenced by an insider. If you are, as I am, approximately the same age as the author, you will find her experiences unique and different from yours, yet, in some respects, strangely familiar. Tabor describes events from our history growing up during the Cold War. She confirms many of our own memories, impressions and understanding, while simultaneously challenging them. I enjoyed this book for the memories it evoked and for providing the "food for thought" to look at them again but, this time, with hindsight and the author's insight.… (more)

Amidst laborious detail, Ms. Taber describes the distressingly solitary and difficult life of the people who live on the campo of Patagonia. She had a romantic view of wanting to live in "Emersonian self-reliance in a wild and depriving landscape." But her painstaking prose well-laced with similes and metaphors ("The yellow-brown land was a slab of hot bristly pancake...rabbits bounced away from the prow of the car, like wheat being threshed...Liliana was a glass of sparkling tonic about to overflow") makes reading her book almost as excruciating as life must be on her peninsula in Patagonia. After reading this book, I don't think I'd want to visit that part of the world.… (more)