1200 miles down, 1600 to go. That combined with storm reports put me into serious driver mode: only highways, no meals, no fun. Reading? Not a chance. Having a decent book post for the blog? Hopeless.
UNTIL … I happened to drive by a sign for The World’s Largest Sandhill Crane.
The enormous metal crane loomed so large that I had to stop. I’d seen a few giant, elegant birds trying to dodge the storms and didn’t recognize them. Just maybe, I thought, they were cranes like Richard Powers wrote about in The Echo Maker.
The Echo Maker, which won the 2006 National Book Award, is mostly about memory, identity and relationships, with a bit of scientific hubris and environmentalism thrown in. Tying all the themes together is a motif of sandhill cranes migrating across the plains.
If you missed it last October, Ed Champion organized a five-part roundtable of The Echo Maker readers to discuss the book. In the last part, Richard Powers joined in and answered some of our questions. Read The Echo Maker, and check out the rountable: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.
