Review: Requiem
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 6, 2011
Review: DISSOLUTE KINSHIP: A 9/11 ROAD TRIPby David AntrobusDavid Antrobus explores honestly that day, the people involved and the human heart hurt. This book explores the truth as well, honestly and squarely. It's about a road trip into the heart of autumn displaced. A welcome. America to the world of fragility. It's a trip of words that measure out what so many of us felt but could not express. On that day Atlas did shrug and nothing was for sure.The author goes to ground zero and the ash, and all those pouring rains that came down on us literally and figuratively. This is gentle and compassionate and wise. Suddenly New York City is every city in the world. Along his road trip,  he found the aurora borealis peeking in first-thought shadow as he drove to Canada, his home. Filled with other worldly cascades of color.. The top of the world huge and protective.An inveterate people watcher David Antrobus went to NYC subways and watched the people with their distant ghost haunted glazed eyes. On the streets of New York he saw urban refugees gone from their apartments because of the dust; it wasn't safe. One wonders how many of these people, if they were elderly, thought the pogroms had followed them here. If you were there when 911 happened you'll feel the shock of it again and the muted wanderlust of one man trying to preserve what we had lost. The sweet muted colors betrayed, and rivers and lands befouled.Bob Dylan couldn't help. And all those movies with the twin towers in the background are now painful little needles. Everything is toxic now and embarrassingly sad. He writes The Statue of Liberty  "a failed guardian," stands in "equinox light over a land where freedom may no longer be enough." Suddenly the world was smooth ice, like we were sliding everywhere with everybody else. He mourns the stupidity and greed that followed from a particularly sick administration. It's a reflective book, gentle opening of why?