"A memoir that reads like a mystery" -- Elle
The End of the Rainy Season: Discovering My Family's Hidden Past in Brazil
"FAMILIES ARE SO MIXED NOWADAYS. INDEED, AS A RULE, EVERYBODY TURNS OUT TO BE SOMEBODY ELSE." --Oscar Wilde
When I began investigating the supposed murder of a family member in the Amazon, I had no idea how applicable Wilde's quip would prove to be.
I grew up being told that Walter Lindberg, my father's supposedly brave and adventurous stepfather, had been killed in the late 1920's while exploring the Amazon, looking for gold and making maps. Many years later, my search for the truth would reveal more about the family members I thought I knew than the supposedly exotic one I'd never met.
Readers have told me that The End of the Rainy Season helped them navigate their own family secrets. It's important to find and face the truth at any time. Better yet, speak openly and honestly within your family before emotional pain turns into the kind of shame that can be passed down through generations.
Through my 17 years of work with an international environmental organization, I have learned that just as secrets within families often emerge later in anger or disguise, so, too, do nature's "truths" resist efforts to bury and silence them. Destruction of the Amazon is having devastating consequences, turning a majestic, life-giving rainforest into a drying, burning place that emits more greenhouse gases than it absorbs. Worldwide, the increase in extreme weather events due to the climate crisis is another ominous example of how nature is the most powerful avenger of them all. Nature. has given us plenty of notice. It's up to humans to face the truth and change our ways.
PRAISE FOR THE END OF THE RAINY SEASON:
"A beautifully written, moving and distinct work." --Library Journal
"This intriguing journey of self-discovery reads as an exotic travel memoir as well." -- Booklist
"An adventure story, a family saga, an astonishing journey of discovery and identity." -- Kristen Iversen, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
"I was in thrall, page after page, awaiting the answers to mysteries past and present." -- Kathleen Finneran, The Tender Land: A Family Love Story
"In the end, many questions about the past will never be answered with any certainty, which leads to bigger questions: How do we move forward when our understanding is provisional? How do we make choices based on unstable knowledge? Ms. Lindberg’s big, ambitious book traces a path through this disarray, and in doing so she provides a map for the many migrations we face in the 21st century." --Professor Stephanie Wade, East Hampton Star
Scandal on Plum Island: A Commander Becomes the Accused
Scandal on Plum Island tells the neglected story of Major Benjamin M. Koehler, n distinguished Army officer who was blind-sided by charges of homoerotic behavior in 1914. "A couple of officers whom Ben has had occasion to correct have gotten a dozen or more soldiers to swear to a lot of lies," wrote Koehler's educated sister, who lived with him on Plum Island, NY, where Ben served as commander of a 700-soldier post before World War I.