Description: The Iron Scar is both a literal journey by a father and son on the longest railway journey in the world, and a metaphoric pilgrimage of not just the author and his adult son, but all of us.
Brief description: Bob Kunzinger is the author of nine collections of essays, including A Third Place: Notes in Nature, and Penance: Walking with the Infant. He lives in Virginia.
Review Quotes:
The Iron Scar brought me on a journey that unexpectedly and artfully had me thinking about my own father and my sons throughout the book, as well as introducing me to the wild, warm, and colorful world of Siberia. Thank you for bringing me onboard with you and your son.
I wish every book I've read over the past two months had been as moving, gripping, and loaded with fascinating information. The journey becomes an emotional and thematic whole that transcends the standard "look what I saw" travel book. So many things stick with me: the royal blue station shacks, the birches with no tops, the meat and potato pastries, the smell of onions, the vodka, the wheel tapping, the once-in-hundred-year flooding, the vast vacancies of human presence, the moving village of the train, the Leningrad hero, the Leningrad ghosts . . . Just so much. Well done!