The Glimpse Traveler

[T]his book ha[s] a distinctive writing style. Boruch is a poet and English professor, so she has a beautiful way with words.

What Marianne Boruch has done in this memoir is nothing short of extraordinary: nearly 40 years after the fact, she has managed to recreate a road trip-and a time period-so wholly that I felt like I was there.

This slender volume by poet and essayist Boruch . . . will transport readers to a time when a nation's youth searched for meaning against the backdrop of the Vietnam War.

The Glimpse Traveler is more than a book written about a generation; this is a book about memory and how we recall the intense moments of our lives. Most writers would reveal the story in long chapters, steeped with descriptions and dialogue, but Boruch offers us something different: the way memories are really revealed.

The Glimpse Traveler sets the past glimmering with fragments of remembered light.

With a frank poignancy which paints the experience as neither good or bad but merely a truly unique experience like none other, The Glimpse Traveler is a thoughtful and much recommended pick.

The journey of this memoir is not only one from this side of the country to the other, a mere matter of mileage, but from this point in time to a point somewhere in memory, a distance measured in decades, that blurs and disappears as soon as it arrives. 'Oh moment of history,' exclaims Boruch's narrator, invoking memory's ancient muse, 'be specific and huge,' a summons to which The Glimpse Traveler answers in full.

Most exceptional is Marianne Boruch's The Glimpse Traveler, published by Indiana University Press. . . . There are so many goodies in this book. Boruch lingers in the most intriguing moments of their absurdly haphazard journey across the country with an awareness of the clichés of the time. . . . The book clips along at an addictive pace and in what seems like no time at all reaches its staggering climax and then concludes with an equally stunning finale.