{ "item_title" : "Returning to Earth", "item_author" : [" Jim Harrison", "Traci Svendsgaard", "Tom Weiner "], "item_description" : "Jim Harrison is one of our most beloved authors, about whom The New York Times Book Review has written, There is a singular comfort in knowing, on the first page of a novel, that you are in the hands of a master ... who makes the ordinary extraordinary, the unnamable unforgettable. In Returning to Earth. Harrison has delivered a masterpiece--a tender, profound, and magnificent novel about life, death, and finding redemption in sometimes unlikely places. Donald is a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man, married to a white woman who renounced the wealth she was raised with, and father to two grown children. As Returning to Earth opens, he is slowly dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease. His condition deteriorating, he realizes no one alive will be able to pass on to his children their family history once he is gone. He begins dictating to his wife, Cynthia, stories he has never shared with anyone--as around him, his family struggles with how to lay him to rest with the same dignity with which he always lived. Over the course of the year following Donald's death, his loved ones deal with how to let him go. His daughter begins studying Chippewa ideas of death for clues on her father's religion, and her mother, Cynthia, is at loose ends for how to protect or guide her. Bereft of the family she created to escape the malevolent influence of her own father, Cynthia, along with her brother, David, an eccentric whose life mission is to prevent Mexican-border crossers from dying in transit, find, all these years later, that redeeming the past is not a lost cause. Returning to Earth is a deeply moving book about origins and endings, how to make sense of loss, and how to live with honor for the dead. It isone of the finest novels of Harrison's long, storied career, and will confirm his standing as one of the most important American writers now working. ", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/78/616/677/0786166770_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "24.95", "online_price" : "24.95", "our_price" : "24.95", "club_price" : "24.95", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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"I'm forty-five and it seems I'm to leave the Earth early but these things happen to people." That's Donald's calm take on dying too young, "falling apart in many directions," of a horribly aggressive case of Lou Gehrig's disease. Half Chippewa, half Finn, "a foot in both worlds," but firm in his Chippewa beliefs, strong in his connection to the earth and all its creatures, Donald is the center of Returning to Earth, Jim Harrison's gracefully moving ninth novel, set in his home ground of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Living a good life and dying a good death are big themes but Harrison comes at these subjects with a unique storytelling subtlety. Four separate narrators, each performed by a different reader, move the story forward and back in time. Donald begins, talking of his life while dictating never-shared memories of his wild forebears to his wife, Cynthia. Then Cynthia and two others, her older brother and his stepson follow. They all loved Donald profoundly and are profoundly affected by his dignity in dying.