品牌：
基本信息
·出版社：Grove Press
·页码：304 页码
·出版日：2003年
·ISBN：0802140009
·条码：9780802140005
·版次：2003-04-01
·装帧：平装
·开本：20开 20开
内容简介
Book Description
Things You Get for Free is a travelogue rich with charm and wisdom and sparkling with its author's singular wit. As a priest, Michael McGirr decides to take his charming and inimitable mum on the honeymoon she and her late husband never got around to having. He uses his six-week vacation to take her on a tour of Europe. Between meditating on their hilarious and illuminating travels and on the historical figures who dot their voyage -- everyone from Hemingway to Michelangelo to the quietly heroic people who inspire Michael's special brand of faith -- McGirr plunges deep into his family history, unearthing sickness and instability but also moments of great love and perseverance. Things You Get for Free is a deeply moving spiritual and intellectual journey, proving the truth behind a mother's favorite saying: "I know more than you think I do."
FromPublishers Weekly
A young Jesuit priest from Australia and his "mum" tour Europe at the height of summer and live to tell about it in this witty, engaging travelogue and family memoir. In 1996, McGirr decided to take his mother on the honeymoon she never had a six-week whirlwind jaunt through London, Paris, Rome, Florence and other well-traveled destinations ("We've boldly vowed to go where millions have gone before," McGirr tells the travel agent). McGirr and Mum experience the best and worst of Europe: lunch in the peers' dining room at the House of Lords, the paint-peeling profanity of a Glasgow tour guide and the flabbergasting sight of hundreds of nuns carrying make-up compacts into the Sistine Chapel (they use the mirrors to see the ceiling without craning their necks). They frequent pubs, ridicule other tourists, hang out in tattoo parlors and generally enjoy the hell out of themselves. McGirr offers some of the sharpest observations of European foibles since Mark Twain swept through the continent. But his book is more than just a travel comedy. It is also an investigation into the past of the Catholic Church, the Jesuits and the McGirr family itself, which left Europe just two generations before. Readers will come for the humor, but they'll stay for McGirr's haunting memories of his path into the priesthood, his mother's sacrifices and his father's death. Brimming with lyrical insight and earthy humor, this debut is a rare treat.
FromBooklist
McGirr, a Jesuit priest, embarks on a life-altering odyssey with his aging--but indomitable--mother. Deciding to take his mother on the European vacation his father promised but never delivered, the author and his mum leave Australia for a six-week jaunt across Western Europe. Along the way, they learn more about each other and the ties that bind them than they do about the cities and towns they visit. Interwoven with poignant memories of a less-than-perfect father and husband and revealing snippets of a checkered family history, their journey eventually becomes an illuminating voyage of self-discovery. Populated with an eccentric cast of fellow wayfarers, this heartfelt, often hilarious travelogue offers a rare and intimate glimpse into the intricacies of a mother-son relationship.
Margaret Flanagan
Book Dimension
Height (mm) 213 Width (mm) 141
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