At age 34, newly married and established in her career as an award-winning newspaper journalist, Maggie Downs quits her job, sells her belongings, and embarks on the solo trip of a lifetime: Her mother’s.
As a child, Maggie Downs often doubted that she would ever possess the courage to visit the destinations her mother dreamed of one day seeing. “You are braver than you think,” her mother always insisted. That statement would guide her as, over the course of one year, Downs backpacked through seventeen countries―visiting all the places her mother, struck with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, could not visit herself―encountering some of the world’s most striking locales while confronting the slow loss of her mother. Interweaving travelogue with family memories, Braver Than You Think takes the reader hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, white-water rafting on the Nile, volunteering at a monkey sanctuary in Bolivia, praying at an ashram in India, and fleeing the Arab Spring in Egypt.
By embarking on an international journey, Downs learned to make every moment count―traveling around the globe and home again, losing a parent while discovering the world.
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Maggie Downs is Braver Than You Think?and braver than she thinks, before she sets off on the globe-trotting, culture-hopping, grief-haunted trip of her (and her mother’s) lifetime. This is a book about love and loss, yes, but also about survival, about curiosity and determination, and about how to thrive when the world seems suddenly to hold no certainty. I devoured this book in one sitting and closed its last pages enriched, moved, and inspired. You will be, too.” ?Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body
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