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As indicated by the urgency of the title, 12000
Miles in the Nick of Time is about traveling quick over a
great distance in the midst of a crisis--in this case, an emergency
of the heart. Author Mark Jacobson and his wife, Nancy Bray Cardozo,
decided that their family--the three kids and two parents--had
reached a mutual moment of decision. Things were tense in the
house. Their precocious, darling oldest daughter Rae was raging
through teenagehood, staying out late, flunking out of school.
The other two, Rosalie and Billy, teenagers-in-training, were
spending way too much time in front of the TV. This desultory
equation, the parents thought, in their admittedly slapdash way,
could only be changed by the introduction of something radical,
something big.
The World was big. The World was radical. The World
would get everyone's attention. To the World they would go, and
too bad about the cries and whines of der kinder. It would
be FOR THEIR OWN GOOD. So they went, on their particular baedeker,
a journey into what the parents surmised would constitute a touch
of The Real: Thailand, Cambodia, India (dementedly, the parents
actually believed the kids would really like Varanasi, where Hindu
pilgrims bring the bodies of their dead relatives to burned on
massive pyres, the ashes tossed into the River Ganges), Nepal,
the deserts of Jordan, Cairo, the soon-to-be seething streets
of Jerusalem, and eventually Paris and London.
12,000 Miles should inspire wanderlust in
all those who ever have taken any sort of a journey, or even contemplated
one, but this isn't really a travel book. It's not even an adventure
travel book, though the Jacobsons certainly had some harrowing
and mind-blowing encounters during their three months abroad.
12,000 Miles is about another kind of travel, about remembering
who your family is and how you all got that way. It is about journeying
through the often impersonal, frightening, dangerous universe
with the people who, for better or worse, share your DNA, experiences,
memories, and dreams. It is about the spaces that exist in between
you and the people you love, how they sometimes grow too great,
and how distances can be closed, simply by reaching out and taking
the time to look at each other, sometimes in the most remote of
locales. This is the story of an American family.
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