Returning From Afar: A Memoir

About this book

"BOBRICK IS A GREAT HISTORIAN. HIS MEMOIR IS SPELLBINDING" -- Steve Donoghue, Book Critic-at-Large, The Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe. This poignant, at times dramatic, beautifully written, and deeply reflective book, is the farewell work of "perhaps the most interesting American historian writing today." (The New York Times) Benson Bobrick earned his doctorate in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and in 2002 received the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His fourteen books (including two national best sellers) have been featured on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, widely praised in both academic and popular journals, and published in sixteen different lands. Throughout his career, Bobrick's work--which has ranged from Russian and American history to medicine and technology to topics on religious and esoteric themes--has appealed not only to historians and general readers but to men and women of letters across a wide field. After his first book, LABYRINTHS OF IRON, was published in 1981, Lewis Mumford, the great social historian, called it “an extraordinarily original work, by a mind of the first order.” And in a letter to the author, the famed playwright John Guare described Bobrick’s WIDE AS THE WATERS as “Thrilling. It made my jaw drop, consistently drop, with amazement….A remarkable accomplishment.” Part memoir, part religious autobiography, RETURNING FROM AFAR is a unique summing up. The author and his wife, Hilary, make their home in Vermont.