For many travelers, the prepandemic pace of whirlwind getaways and bucket-list-skimming trips seems so 2019. Now, as destinations cautiously reopen, travelers who spent a year or more confronted by climate change, social activism and a lack of human connection are embracing slow motion as a sustainable speed for exploring the world.
Marguerite Hanley, a native Californian who lives in Amsterdam, is one of those travelers. “After a year of being forced to look inward, we have all realized the value and impact of our actions, both globally in terms of Covid, as humans infringing on habitat, and how we treat people in our community,” said Ms. Hanley, who recently decided to decelerate an ambitious honeymoon in Africa planned for next March. Instead of a whirlwind trip that included a Botswana safari, a visit to Cape Town and an exploration of South African wine country, she scaled down to concentrate on a few camps in Botswana that support conservation and local communities.
Nature has been an escape for many of us during the Covid-19 pandemic. The freedom of wild animals has seemed especially wonderful when our own movements and associations have been clipped. If you watch wildlife closely, however, you will eventually witness the uncontrolled spread of illness — the worst-case scenario we have spent more than a year of our lives now trying to avoid.
My experience as a physician — a professional life spent mainly tending to the dying — and as a daughter who navigated my mother’s last years with chronic illness, has kept me alert to the national conversations now taking place about the role of professional caregiving as essential health care.
I don't know how I got to be as old as I am without knowing that dressage horses danced to music. Don't get me wrong: I knew dressage was fancy horses. I just didn't know it was fancy horses who danced to an orchestral arrangement of Queen's "Radio Ga-Ga."
This year, King has already delivered one novel with a strong connection to the world of books. In March’s “Later,” the protagonist’s mother works as a literary agent, her livelihood dependent on the output of a single best-selling author. A scary predicament indeed.
King’s new novel, “Billy Summers,” goes all-in in its depiction of a neophyte learning to craft a story. Billy, however, isn’t an earnest young creative writing student at some community college. Rather, he’s a 44-year-old sure-shot assassin, albeit one who shoots and kills only “bad” people.
Like “Fun Home,” Alison Bechdel’s magnificent graphic memoir, her new work also uses a familiar scaffolding to build a book that seems brand-new and slightly unfamiliar. “The Secret of Superhuman Strength” is a highly crafted literary work. Following its graphic predecessors, “Superhuman Strength” gets its mojo from Bechdel’s blend of low-cult form and high-cult subject matter.
Taking the title of Jan Grue’s memoir, “I Live a Life Like Yours,” literally, I approached it first by creating a mental Venn diagram, testing the veracity of his titular statement. And indeed, many areas in our lives do intersect: We are both married with children and pursue demanding careers. Moreover, we each bear the weight of a devastating diagnosis and a sobering prognosis. Confronting society’s stigmas and the general aversion to anything other than what is considered “normal,” we struggle to balance others’ expectations and presumptions with our own. To slightly different degrees, we have each accepted the necessity of a wheelchair.