Sarah Gorham recounts her childhood education as a rebellious, insecure, angry girl shipped overseas to a tiny international school perched on a mountain shelf in Bernese-Oberland, Switzerland. There, boot camp style, she experienced deprivation, acute embarrassment, and keen educational guidance, all in the name of growing up. The Swiss landscape influenced her with its paradoxes: unforgiving slopes and peaks; government-controlled hills and valleys-so, too, the languages she's obliged to learn: one ruffian, the other militaristic.
Though her stay lasted a mere two years, her time there was so crucial in her transition to adulthood that she returns to those years decades later, each and every night in memory and dream. There are brief forays into the science of surviving an avalanche; Sherlock Holmes's faked demise at the Reichenbach Falls; the origins of meringue; and the history of homesickness and its spiritual twin, Sehnsucht. In her travels Gorham tracks an adolescent experience both agonizingly familiar and curiously exotic.
"A new kind of landscape writing resonant with the rhythms of landscape painting, and of water as ice, as falls, as torrent, or avalanche, Alpine Apprentice is an unforgettable curation of a moment in time, a journey, an education, and its bordering dreams. In tones stunningly crisp, rapturous, and sure, Sarah Gorham has taken the book-length essay to a place of high art."
Mary Cappello, author of Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack
"Rothman . . . tells a series of gripping and often grisly tales of [1830s Mississippi]. . . . Rothman tells these stories well, evoking a sense of social and psychological context for the main historical actors, so that the actions described become understandable, to the extent that delusional mob behavior can ever be understood."
Bill Roorbach, author of Life Among Giants and The Remedy for Love
"A palpable, loving evocation of experiences 'tucked deep' into the author's soul."
