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Upcoming Books:
October 24
The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
November/December
Monuments Men by Robert Edsel

Author Quotes: “Paradox reconciles all contradictions.” 
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts
 

Author Bio:

Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE (11 February 1915 – 10 June 2011) was a British author, scholar and soldier, best known as Paddy Fermor, who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Cretan resistance during World War II.[1] He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer",[2] with books including his classic A Time of Gifts (1977). A BBC journalist once described him as "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene."[3] - from Wikipedia

is reading A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor for Thursday, September 19, 2013.

A Time of Gifts is by the late Patrick Leigh Fermor, one of the finest travel writers ever. The title of the book comes from a poem by Louis MacNeice: the ‘time of gifts’ is youth, and the book describes a journey Fermor took when he was 18 years old. Looking back over three decades, he splendidly recaptures a time of recklessness, adventure and bliss. 

He describes himself as having a “cruel Fauntleroy veneer, cynically assumed to mask the Charles Addams fiend that lurked beneath: it coloured with an even darker tinct the sum of misdeeds which soon began heaping up.” He was proud to claim; the same psychiatrist had seen him as Virginia Woolf. He drifted from school to school. He excelled at writing and thought he might set out to become a writer. Impulsively, he decides to walk across Europe, from Rotterdam to Constantinople. With rucksack filled with a clean shirt and some favorite books, in the December of 1933, he sets out.

In the time before World War II, when Hitler has just come to power, Fermor walks through a Europe soon to be forever changed.

A beautiful and poignant musical tribute to the late Patrick Leigh Fermor