Glad News of the Natural World by T. R. Pearson (Simon & Schuster, $24)
"I can't help but believe I was intended for better use than I've gotten. Not celebrated achievement or selfless Christian industry but some manner, at least, of steady worthwhile employment. As it is, I'm largely wasted, only spottily engaged and, for a robust thirty-four-year-old, almost criminally unambitious.
I didn't move, like people tend to, to the city with a dream. I wasn't propelled by a nagging itch for fame, an appetite for self-expression, an overstimulated ardor for all things cosmopolitan. I can't remember ever hoping to abuse the rubes back home with galling displays of the polished urban sophisticate I'd become since, but for my father, I very probably would have stayed a rube myself. He made me come to the city, arranged for a job and dispatched me to fill it.
He was hardly the sort with call to address his own regrets through me. He'd seen a fair bit of the world, but as an airman in Korea and as the husband of a woman prone to fits of wanderlust who'd bound herself in holy wedlock (as my father told it) to her porter. My mother was regularly exposed in the beauty shop to travel magazines and attended missionary slide shows in the Methodist fellowship hall which had the effect of aggravating her sense of personal stagnation until her longing to be at some remove from where she'd ended up could only get stifled and tamped down by an actual vacation." --excerpted from the book
