Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey from Down Under to All Over

Anyone who grew up 1960-70 will enjoy this. Loved the travel through Israel and the different characters that were her pen pals.

Australian born Geraldine Brooks spent many years as a foreign correspondent covering the Middle East. I loved her book, "Nine Parts of Desire" which was about Muslim women, and I have followed her life somewhat as she is often mentioned by her husband, Tony Horwitz, in his books "Confederates in the Attic", "Baghdad Without a Map," and "One for the Road." I find her an excellent reporter and in this memoir, "Foreign Correspondence," she turns the spotlight on herself.As a child growing up in a lower middle class neighborhood on a street actually called "Bland Street", she yearned for a larger world. And so she developed pen pals. There was a girl from New Jersey, another one from France, and even one from an upper class neighborhood just a few towns away. And then there were two Israeli boys, one an Arab and one a Jew. As an adult, she found these old letters in her father's basement and, now more than twenty years later, she decided to look up each of these people. What follows is the result of her quest and some wonderful insights into world events from a personal one-on-one perspective. It was fascinating.As a teenager in the early seventies she was aware of the new consciousness developing, even reaching her in her protective Catholic school. She had an active imagination and the gift of using words well. It's not surprising that she developed pen pals and that they influenced her life so much. Her gift of words certainly reached me too. I shared her sense of wonder and enthusiasm as she looked forward to each letter. I felt her straining to break the bonds of her loving but restrictive world. I felt her hopes and dreams and frustrations. And then, later, I shared her discoveries as she searched out the people who had meant so much to her early life. She writes with a clear voice, painting a picture with details, taking me on her quest to discover the world and eventually to discover herself. The book is short, a mere 210 pages but she sure does pack a lot into it. It's a wonderful read. Highly recommended.

I started reading Geraldine Brooks' books when another Author recommended "A Year of Wonders" - a fascinating look at the plague-village in the UK. Since then I have been addicted to her intelligent style of writing. My only disappointment is that this wonderfully skilled author hasn't written more. As this is a memoir rather than a historical novel, I didn't know what to expect. But as I grew up in the suburbs of Sydney, I found myself transported back to my childhood as the fine details of her early years are explored. As so often is the case, it is the small details that give these memoirs poignancy...and Geraldine Brooks is consistently accurate with the details. You can almost smell the home cooking and feel the excitement of exploring new things as a youngster as you read through the early pages.As her book progresses, lightly touching on her amazing career, I became more aware of just what a person with a vision can achieve. When she explores what happened to some of her friends from those years, and how their lives diverged it left me wondering about the things which shape our lives, for better or for worse.I personally found that this book took me on a journey that was thought-provoking, sometimes sad, and at other times inspirational - but always interesting.

Like the author of this book, as a young girl I had a pen-pal. I live in the US, and my pen-pal lives in New Zealand. We started writing to each other over 50 years ago, we have visited each other and traveled together, and now we Skype almost daily (just because we can!) Obviously, because of my history, this book really resonated with me. It was fascinating reading about the life of the author, how she found her childhood pen-pals and how they reacted to each other once they met as adults. I think that anyone, even if they never had a pen-pal, would enjoy this story! This is one of my favorite books!

Geraldine Brooks is a great writer, whether non-fiction (9 Parts of Desire) or fiction (any of her books), This one is very personal. She looks up pen pals and friends from her youth in Australia. Some are fine, some have done a lot worse than she has. It is like going to someone else's high school reunion. But she writes so well that you care and are interested in her old friends.

This was a beautifully written, poignant story of childhood, family and friendship. The author really captured for me a sense of what it must have been like growing up in suburban Sydney on 'Bland Street' in the 60s and 70s. As a child growing up in Scotland in the 1970s I also had Pen Pals - a girl from (what was then) Yugoslavia and a Nigerian girl whose father was the Governor of Kano, NIgeria. She went to boarding school and had horses and a pet monkey. Reading Brooks' letters to and from her Pen Pals brought back childhood memories for me, I also remembered thinking these other girls lived in such exotic places and had much more exciting lives than I did. Of course, I lost touch with them but I may still have their letters at my parents' house. I wonder how many readers will be inspired to find their own long lost Pen Pals after reading this book?

I have always enjoyed Geraldine Brooks' stories an writing. This story was unique because it was her biography of her very active life as a journalist and reporter for the Wall Street Journal and others. She traveled all over the world to cover war stories and other important stories. She had a very unique family life lived mostly in Australia. She had pen-pals in various places around the world, because of her worldly curiosity as a child, and followed up later by visiting all the pen-pals about twenty years later. A good read!

I came to this factual book by Geraldine Brooks hot on the heels of appreciation for her novel,  People of the Book . Brooks, now a Virginia resident novelist, was in a prior existence a globe-trotting, wanderlust-filled journalist originally from Concord, a suburb of Sydney, New South Wales.Born in the mid-50s, Brooks recounts growing up in a deeply entrenched culture where nothing really happened, Australians felt second-class parochial citizens, looking to the `mother country' with deep blue affiliations under Prime Minister Robert Menzies. The national anthem was even God Save The Queen. An underachieving, `don't be a tall poppy' syndrome was rife.Brooks' parents clearly had wider horizons in their souls, and she and her elder sister were clearly going to be taller poppies.Desperate to know something of worlds beyond, Brooks began a series of correspondences with pen pals, from before her teens. Fed by initially a fascination with Star Wars, and then later with emerging socialist, internationalist and artistic interests, she had penfriends from firstly, a classier suburb of Sydney, from the States (where she always wanted to be) two pen-pals from Israel, a Christian Arab and a Jew, and a French girl from a tiny village.Although she stopped writing to all of them bar her fellow Trekkie fan, the American girl, whilst still in her teens, a chance discovery of all the letters some 30 years later, led her to revisit her childhood, the zeitgeist of the times and the place, and trace the development not just of her own identity, life and viewpoints, but also look at how Australia emerged as a taller poppy.She was also curious to discover what had happened to her several pen-pals, and set out to find them.The several stories are moving, amusing, heart-breaking, and also surprisingly inspiring, not least for Brooks herself, who discovers that one life, which seemed on the surface to be the farthest away from the life she would want for herself, is one she comes full circle to most appreciate.She is an excellent raconteur of the various stories and the changing voices from childhood to adult, ranging from Brooks, the budding young teenage scientist with a desire to solve the problem of world hunger through eating weeds - an experiment on mice which goes sadly wrong, to the much later discovery of a sad and long kept secret from her father's life.I can't resist a little account from the exchanges between Brooks and her fellow Trekkie penpal, Joannie, about the mouse experiment :"I named one of the control mice Joannie, although since all were albinos I had difficulty in telling her apart from the others. Spock Rudolph and Margot (the latter two named for a balletomane phase I was passing through).................Unfortunately my Mr Spock met a grisly end, along with the noble attempt to alleviate world hunger.......The project fell apart when my mice - the control group, fed on the gourmet mouse mix - began eating each other. The day we gave away the sole - and very fat - survivor of my doomed experiment was a happy one for my mother. Joannie was consoling "Perhaps you just had paranoid mice."A lovely, absorbing read, which gave me some fascinating insights. And not just about cannibal mice. People of the Book

Another wonderful book by Geraldine Brooks. It does explain how she has managed to do the research for some of her other remarkable works. Her descriptions of travel and places are full of feeling as well as precise descriptions. I look forward to the next, though I have no idea what it will be about.

Loved all of Geraldine Brooke's fiction so far and with this non fiction account she grabs my attention all over again. I really enjoy the way she explores and narrates. Truly applaud this author!

Interesting book.

A very interesting memoir particularly from an Australian immigrants angle. The pen-pal characters were described clearly and really came to life.