Even Darkness Sings: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima: Finding Hope in the Saddest Places on Earth

by Thomas H Cook

Overview

Thomas Cook has always been drawn to dark places, for the powerful emotions they evoke and for what we can learn from them. These lessons are often unexpected and sometimes profoundly intimate, but they are never straightforward.

With his wife and daughter, Cook travels across the globe in search of darkness--from Lourdes to Ghana, from San Francisco to Verdun, from the monumental, mechanized horror of Auschwitz to the intimate personal grief of a shrine to dead infants in Kamukura, Japan. Along the way he reflects on what these sites may teach us, not only about human history, but about our own personal histories.

During the course of a lifetime of traveling to some of earth's most tragic locales, from the leper colony on Molokai to ground zero at Hiroshima, he finds not only darkness, but a light that can illuminate the darkness within each of us. Written in vivid prose, this is at once a personal memoir of exploration (both external and internal) and a strangely heartening look at the radiance and optimism that may be found at the very heart of darkness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643133478
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	03/10/2020
Pages:	394
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

THOMAS H. COOK is best known as a hugely popular crime novelist. He is the winner of the Edgar Award for The Chatham School Affair and has been shortlisted for the CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger and the Anthony Award. He divides his time between Cape Cod and Los Angeles. This is his first work of nonfiction.

Table of Contents

Prologue: By Way of the Alcázar 1

Lourdes 12

Auschwitz 26

Snapshot: Cosenza 46

Kalaupapa 50

Verdun 67

Snapshot: Nadi, Fiji 84

Kamakura 92

Machecoul 104

Snapshot: Granada 118

Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires 123

The Forest and the Bridge 137

Snapshot: Adanwomase 156

Okinawa/Hiroshima 166

New Echota 192

Snapshot: Kumasi 211

Monte Sano Mountain/Copenhagen Harbour/Landet Churchyard/Pére Lachaise/Verona 217

Elmina 232

Snapshot: Phu Quoc 252

Melos/Kampot/Krong Kep/Saigon 256

Snapshot: Alice Springs 275

Deny/Londonderry 281

Ground Zero 295

Wieliczka 306

Choeung Ek/Tuol Sleng 316

Snapshot: Tangiers 326

Martha's Vineyard 333

Snapshot: Place de Grève 347

The Case for Darkness: An Itinerary 356

Selected Bibliography 367

Acknowledgements: 375

Editorial Reviews

“Cook writes with a tender precision—a stunning and revelatory book that will haunt you for months to come.”—Catholic Herald

“A fascinating, troubling memoir from a fine writer.” —Mick Herron, winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award for Dead Lions

“Cook writes movingly, perceptively, fulfilling his assertion that ‘there is much to be gained where much has been lost.’ ”—Irish Times

“A luminous memoir in which crime novelist Cook recounts his travels with his wife and daughter to bloody and blighted locales. The result is a gripping exploration of how hope sprouts from despair.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

A fascinating, troubling memoir from a fine writer.

Mick Herron

Perhaps the season’s most unlikely narrative turn. As Cook’s journeys accumulate, a reader loses any trepidation about approaching these sites of sorrow, awakening instead to Cook’s main purpose as the narrative acquires a humble gravitas. Cook promises that ‘there is much to be gained where much has been lost, and we deny ourselves that bounty at the peril of our souls,’ a truth to which this surprising volume attests.

New York Times Book Review

Cook writes movingly, perceptively, fulfilling his assertion that 'there is much to be gained where much has been lost.'

Irish Times

As Cook's journeys accumulate, a reader loses any trepidation about approaching these sites of sorrow, awakening instead to Cook's main purpose as the narrative acquires a humble gravitas. Cook promises that "there is much to be gained where much has been lost, and we deny ourselves that bounty at the peril of our souls," a truth to which this surprising volume attests.

The New York Times Book Review - Andrew McCarthy

07/09/2018
Horrific atrocities prompt reflection and hesitant redemption in this sometimes lugubrious, sometimes luminous memoir in which crime novelist Cook (The Chatham School Affair) recounts his travels with his wife and daughter to bloody and blighted locales. The several dozen destinations include citadels of death, like Auschwitz and the Verdun battlefield, where 300,000 men died during WWI (Cook finds the solemnity there shattered by boisterous teenagers), but also more obscure corners of sorrow: a Japanese temple to the souls of aborted fetuses; a Parisian square that hosted a grisly public execution; the nation of Ghana, sad partly because of a former slave prison but mainly because of ongoing poverty. Cook plumbs the fascinating histories of these sites, leavening them with vibrant present-day travelogue, like an evocative depiction of the Catholic shrine at Lourdes as a study in neon-lit tawdriness beside candle-lit piety (clear Virgin Mary statues were crafted with her in “a blue gown that could be unscrewed, thus turning the sacred effigy into a water container”). Cook doesn’t reach for moral lessons in the awful past; instead they emerge tacitly from signs of life and compassion he discovers in the present. The result is a gripping exploration of how hope sprouts from despair. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Cook writes with a tender precision—a stunning and revelatory book that will haunt you for months to come.

Catholic Herald

2018-07-30

A trip through "some of the saddest places on earth" that the author describes as "less sad than revelatory and appreciative."

After more than 30 works in his genre, prolific, award-winning crime novelist Cook (A Dancer in the Dust, 2015, etc.) tries his hand at nonfiction with a quirky but engrossing travel book of 28 short chapters whose theme—unhappy locales throughout the world—delivers on its promise. In addition to the usual suspects—Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Verdun, ground zero and the former World Trade Center—there are some decidedly more obscure places. Phu Quoc is a small island where America's Saigon ally kept prisoners during the Vietnam War. New Echota is the former capital of the Cherokee nation in Georgia. Historians often lament America's forced expulsion of the tribe to Oklahoma in the 1830s; in fact, they endured a death march similar to Bataan's, with much the same rate of starvation, abuse, and death. As the world's two leading sites of suicide, Japan's Aokigahara Forest, at the base of Mount Fuji, and the Golden Gate Bridge share a chapter. Of the former, Cook writes, "since 1950, over five hundred people have come here to die by their own hand. In 2003 alone, one hundred bodies were found by the wood's hikers and volunteer searchers." An entire African nation, Ghana, occupies two. It is far from the poorest and not particularly violent, but it is a land of crumbling infrastructure, terrible sanitation, and quietly corrupt leaders who soak up the foreign aid. More than one horror turns up in these pages. A comic-book character today, the real Bluebeard was a 15th-century nobleman in a small French town who raped and tortured to death hundreds of young boys over nearly 15 years until he offended a local bishop.

Insightful, sometimes shocking, and often disheartening.

Kirkus Reviews