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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | BIOGRAPHY ARNOLD, KA. | 31330008790986 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Carlisle - Gleason Public Library | BIO ARNOLD | 32117001977044 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | BIOG/ARNOLD K | 31479006992688 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Ipswich Public Library | 921 ARNOLD, KATIE | 32122002823627 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library | B ARNOLD 2019 | 32124001888122 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | BIOGRAPHY ARNOLD K | 32128003744167 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library | BIOGRAPHY ARNOLD, K. | 31550002330816 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... West Newbury - G.A.R. Memorial Library | 92 ARNOLD | 32135001442041 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | B ARNOLD | 31990004739723 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
In the tradition of Wild and H Is for Hawk, an Outside magazine writer tells her story--of fathers and daughters, grief and renewal, adventure and obsession, and the power of running to change your life.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY REAL SIMPLE
I'm running to forget, and to remember.
For more than a decade, Katie Arnold chased adventure around the world, reporting on extreme athletes who performed outlandish feats--walking high lines a thousand feet off the ground without a harness, or running one hundred miles through the night. She wrote her stories by living them, until eventually life on the thin edge of risk began to seem normal. After she married, Katie and her husband vowed to raise their daughters to be adventurous, too, in the mountains and canyons of New Mexico. But when her father died of cancer, she was forced to confront her own mortality.
His death was cataclysmic, unleashing a perfect storm of grief and anxiety. She and her father, an enigmatic photographer for National Geographic, had always been kindred spirits. He introduced her to the outdoors and took her camping and on bicycle trips and down rivers, and taught her to find solace and courage in the natural world. And it was he who encouraged her to run her first race when she was seven years old.
Now nearly paralyzed by fear and terrified she was dying, too, she turned to the thing that had always made her feel most alive: running. Over the course of three tumultuous years, she ran alone through the wilderness, logging longer and longer distances, first a 50-kilometer ultramarathon, then 50 miles, then 100 kilometers. She ran to heal her grief, to outpace her worry that she wouldn't live to raise her own daughters. She ran to find strength in her weakness. She ran to remember and to forget. She ran to live.
Ultrarunning tests the limits of human endurance over seemingly inhuman distances, and as she clocked miles across mesas and mountains, Katie learned to tolerate pain and discomfort, and face her fears of uncertainty, vulnerability, and even death itself. As she ran, she found herself peeling back the layers of her relationship with her father, discovering that much of what she thought she knew about him, and her own past, was wrong.
Running Home is a memoir about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our world--the stories that hold us back, and the ones that set us free. Mesmerizing, transcendent, and deeply exhilarating, it is a book for anyone who has been knocked over by life, or feels the pull of something bigger and wilder within themselves.
"A beautiful work of searching remembrance and searing honesty . . . Katie Arnold is as gifted on the page as she is on the trail. Running Home will soon join such classics as Born to Run and Ultramarathon Man as quintessential reading of the genre."--Hampton Sides, author of On Desperate Ground and Ghost Soldiers
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A woman's crippling grief over her father's death is the starter pistol for this marathon of self-discovery from Arnold, former Outside magazine editor and daughter of National Geographic photographer David Arnold. When a terminal cancer diagnosis halts her father's retirement project of archiving thousands of photos, those images reopen old wounds for Katie. Recalling her parents' separation when she was two, she writes, "It's nearly impossible to untangle my earliest memories from Dad's photographs." Shuttling between his rural Virginia home to care for him and her life in Santa Fe raising two children, she suppressed her anguish. After he died in 2010, she found his diaries, in which he had divulged mixed feelings about fatherhood and "deep resentment" of her. Arnold's narrative includes flashbacks of her need for her father's acceptance; she reveals how at age seven, "desperate for Dad's attention," she agreed to his dare to run a 10K race, and from that point became "a runner by accident." After his death, she relied on ultrarunning to manage anxiety and developed a friendship with Zen writer Natalie Goldberg (author of Writing Down the Bones) who offered koans during their weekly walks together ("You need to know death in order to blossom fully"). While her summations of lessons learned feel too pat, this is a bittersweet recollection of a father-daughter relationship. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A female runner learns more about herself with each race she runs.Arnold, a Santa Fe-based contributing editor at Outside magazine, shares the specifics of her childhood and the relationship she had with her father, a photographer for National Geographic, a profession she respected even as a child ("just the thought of this gave me a little shiver of pride"). When he fell terminally ill, the author embarked on a search to find out who he really was and why he left her mother when she was a young girl. In meticulous detail, Arnold recounts the many times she and her sister visited their father over the years and the ways in which he pushed her to do more than she thought she could. The first example was a six-mile race she ran at the age of 7, an event that set the author up to be a dedicated runner for life. She used running to deal with her father's death, to overcome her doubts as a mother, and to find herself in each phase of her life. Inviting descriptions of the surrounding countryside, the natural highs of extreme exercise, and the pursuit of a peaceful existence balance the monotony of learning how Arnold prepares for each race, each one seemingly longer than the last. She describes setting personal goals prior to each race and how she pushed through the pain and self-doubt to finish. Interwoven with stories of her father and running are the author's reflections on being a mother of two girls and life with her husband, who also runs but who gives Arnold the space and freedom to pursue her own goals. Although overlong, Arnold's memoir will appeal to runners of all types, whether they participate in short-distance races or ultralong endurance tests.A contemplative, soul-searching account of the death of the author's beloved father and how she used long-distance running as a way to heal from the grief. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Arnold, a longtime Outside magazine editor and columnist on the Raising Rippers blog, grapples with grief and acute anxiety following the death of her father, a photographer for National Geographic. This beautifully written chronicle follows her journey through grief and self-discovery while juggling to balance her life as a writer, wife, and mother of two little girls. After her father's death, Arnold takes up ultrarunning (distances longer than 26.2 miles), and, with each 50-to-100-mile race, she draws the kind of strength proclaimed in the unofficial motto of the sport relentless forward progress as she conquers physical and mental obstacles. The memoir is strongest when Arnold weaves back and forth from her childhood years in Virginia (her parents divorced when she was not yet three) to her visits with her father during his terminal illness, to her home life in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Arnold masterfully captures the vulnerability of wading through grief with each step she takes toward self-discovery. This remarkable memoir will undoubtedly resonate with runners but equally so with children of divorce, new mothers, and those who have suffered the loss of a parent. An eloquent tribute to the complexity and vibrancy of a parent-child relationship.--Brenda Barrera Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MEMOIR, AS A FORM, seems often to annoy critics. The memoir is like your backhand, or a 1970s Fiat - there's always something wrong with it. Every few years, in these very pages, someone writes a cranky omnibus review lambasting the genre. Memoirists, published and would-be, were still recovering from Neil Genzlinger's 2011 shot across the bow - unambiguously headlined "The Problem With Memoirs" - when just a few weeks ago came Alexandra Fuller, breastplate shining, to tell us in no uncertain terms that most memoir material is best saved for the shrink's couch. Areally excellent memoir (in her view they're exceedingly rare) ought to be a kind of primer on living. What Fuller wants from a memoir is wisdom. In order to balance its innate narcissism, a memoir ought to instruct. But literature doesn't prescribe, it describes. A good memoir says what happened, not how to live. To read (or write) a memoir as a kind of self-help book is fundamentally to misunderstand the project. It is the job of a literary memoirist simply to write down her experiences with as much art and truth as she can muster. In her debut memoir, "Running Home," Katie Arnold does an admirable job of trusting the everyday material of her life. Arnold, an ultrarunner and contributing editor at Outside magazine, could easily have opted for a different approach, one that solely focuses on the extraordinary aspects of her life as an elite athlete and adventure writer. Instead she writes a story exploring how her growing preoccupation with running has been intertwined with loving and losing her father. She takes the risk of being ordinary, and therefore human. The first half of the book toggles between two time periods: Arnold's comingof-age in the '70s and a contemporary account of her father's death. She writes throughout with the clear prose of an experienced magazine writer. The depiction of her father's final months and days is affecting and vivid - she travels to her dad's side in rural Virginia from her own home in Santa Fe, where she lives with her husband and two young daughters. She makes us feel the displacement of leaving one's adult life to become a child again, and these passages are beautifully detailed. She observes her dad as they clean out the barn, which has long served as his workshop and which he built himself: "He shuffles across the grass to the overflowing dumpster, rests his elbows on the edge, and peers in, surveying the mountain of stuff bound straight for the landfill: the 'Tea for the Tillerman' LP and the Mexican chicken and the decaying scuba kit." These details give us a sense of the free spirit her father once was - more than she'd even realized. Arnold's growing understanding of her father's perfidy - especially the revelation of his many friendships with women not his wives - makes her grief complex and pungent. The book shifts after her dad dies, leaving behind the toggling structure and following Arnold into her new, fatherless life. She feels understandably unmoored. She turns to running for solace. A few years earlier she had somehow completed a marathon, by accident, as she interviewed the runner Dean Karnazes. She also accidentally climbed Half Dome, in Yosemite National Park, again while reporting, as she recounts in an uncharacteristically aimless chapter that might be titled "This One Time? I Climbed Half Dome?" Arnold's missteps seem to take a decidedly positive turn. Her accidental marathon, combined with the extremes of her grief, leads her to toy with the idea of running an ultramarathon. She commits to a 50K race four months away, and she trains as she grieves that first year: "I vary my routes so I don't get bored. I run up Atalaya and along sandy arroyos and only rarely on the road. I prefer slow, long runs to speed work, and hills over flats. No two weeks are ever the same. Grief has its own topography, jagged and unpredictable. In the beginning it was like dragging myself up a vertical face, the surface loose and slippery, trying not to slip backwards into darkness." We learn the emotional terrain, and the practical as well: what she eats for fuel, what she carries during her runs, how she structures her days, how she manages child care. This is the stuff of her life - the fact that it is all done in aid of her extraordinary achievement makes it more compelling, sure, but the homely details would be enough. My book editor once explained the appeal of memoir thus: "It's cozy and voyeuristic." In other words, we want to know how other people live, and Arnold shows That's part of the memoirist's job, it's true, but in order to defeat narcissism, a memoirist also has to reveal the more brutal realities of, well, there's no nice way to say this, the heart. This is the real moral function of the memoir: to say the uncomfortable, even the unsavory truth of one's inmost being, so the reader might recognize herself and feel less alone. Arnold shares her anguish over losing her father, but she unfolds a more challenging narrative as well: her own story as a mother who runs away, just a little. A mother leaving behind her children, even for a short period of time, is a dangerous thing to write about - abandoning one's children is, after all, the great female crime. "Running Home" is at its very best when Arnold writes about finding herself pulled away from her husband and young daughters by her running and her writing. Her mother guilttrips her, and there's something deeper too: She sees her father in her actions. She takes herself on a writing retreat to France and there comes face to face with her father's ghost: "For the first time, lying in my narrow bed, I can see how Dad might have left. He didn't leave for yellow walls in France or for wooden shutters that opened to a steeple and a pond shrouded in mist; he left for another woman, but that woman was an excuse. He left for silence and spaciousness, for freedom, and the idea of it, for staying in bed as late as he pleased. Having this now, I can see how easy it would be to want more." Arnold's life might seem privileged, but her frank self-searching keeps the reader solidly on her side. The second half of the book follows her as she reckons with her father's legacy, making her way through the intermountain West on her own two feet, pounding out her own salvation and becoming an elite ultramarathoner in the bargain. The book has a sweet and earned ending. Unfortunately, Arnold can't resist goosing it a bit. Throughout the last 50 pages, she hits us repeatedly with blasts of the abstract, inflated language of wisdom: "The magic was in not trying, in running strong from my heart and bones straight into the heart of the world." That's just one of many revelations that traffic-jam the end of the book, each loftier than the last, until the reader starts to feel she is a trail runner making an attack on a Colorado peak and reaching false summit after false summit. These life lessons feel extraneous and are impatient-making, because loftiness is not, after all, the job of the memoir. Arnold has already fulfilled that job. She has ushered us into an interesting life and laid bare the darker feelings hidden there. We don't require transcendent wisdom. A writer does not need to be a phoenix. CLAIRE DEDERER'S most recent memoir is "Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning."
Library Journal Review
After her parents' divorce when she was a young child, Arnold (former contributor, Outside Magazine) could not shake the feeling of abandonment by her father, David Arnold, a National Geographic photographer. She oftentimes felt as though she was the one leaving him behind. When David passes away shortly after being diagnosed with cancer, Arnold is unmoored by grief. Questioning her own health and mortality, she attempts to heal her anxiety through myriad natural remedies to no avail. From a friend, she learns the art of walking meditation, which she adopts and translates its principles to running. Setting a goal for herself, she participates and wins her first ultramarathon, advocating for challenging, long-distance runs as a form of therapy. VERDICT Far more than a book about running, this touching memoir takes readers on a compelling and emotional journey as Arnold finds relief from her sorrow. Anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one will find comfort in these pages.-Melissa Keegan, Ela Area P.L., Lake Zurich, IL © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.