Downstream from Here: A Foreign Correspondent Discovers Home

That Troublesome Old Family Place? That's Where Passions Shape a Future...

After plum assignments in Washington, London, Paris, and Buenos Aires, TIME magazine correspondent Charles Eisendrath walks away from the glamor. It isn’t that he got it wrong—the career, the stories—it’s the realization that getting it right in terrorism zones can lead to something far worse for his young family. Kidnappings, home bombings, and “disappearances” were all too common.

Taking a leave of absence, he moves his family to a 146-acre farm in Northern Michigan. But this is no retreat. Journalism, he realizes, is, looking in windows at what others do. Eisendrath lunges out the door to a broader life and doesn't look back.

He plants a cherry orchard, invents a grill James Beard calls “brilliantly thought out,” starts a maple syrup company and teaches his sons to hunt and fish. His journalism now takes the form of founding the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists and Wallace House at the University of Michigan, securing a $60 million endowment to ensure permanence.

This memoir captures a life of action covering wars and recovering from a jungle plane crash; analyzing the personalities of brook trout and why a pet octopus seems to help with a son's stammer. In this book, he tethers it all to a farm alive with the past as it helps fashion his family's future.

Ken Auletta of The New Yorker calls it, “An amazing, beautifully written memoir.” Actor Jeff Daniels says, “Prepare to be inspired.”