Touching the Ancient One

August 14, 2006
On Sunday, August 6, The Schenectady Sunday Gazette ran a review for Touching the Ancient One. The reviewer, John Rowen, did an excellent job, I thought. Mr. Rowen, a book reviewer for about twenty-five years, is quite respected in our area. I’d like to publish the entire review on this website, but hesitate to do that because of copyright laws. Here are a couple of excerpts, however:

  ". . . Rupert Pratt adds a twist to the disaster epic. Past masters of this genre, such as Walter Lord with “A Night to Remember” or Sebastian Junger with “The Perfect Storm,” devote much of their work to setting the stage for the disaster and then re-creating it. They devote less time to considering what happened afterwards. Pratt, a retired Schenectady teacher, describes a disaster with the best of them. But unlike Lord or Junger, he spends more time explaining what happens afterwards—to survivors and the family and friends of people who did not make it."

" . . . Pratt shows how six men took the gift of surviving a plane crash and made it more valuable by living life fully. The passage of time, he suggests, is a gift that helps people understand the lessons of their life."

I will also put these excerpts into Comments on the Book in the sidebar.

You can read the entire review on the Daily Gazette website, but you’ll have to pay a fee of $2 to do so.

Rupert