River Journeys

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, Anne Ayers Koch made semi-regular entries in various journals, chronicling first a Navy childhood around the United States, then high school, college, and the early days of both married and professional life.

The onslaught of adulthood, notably the arrival of children, marked a decades-long pause in such scribbling. Much later, in her sixties, with the most pressing demands of family and work finally receding, she started writing for pleasure once more. Several books eventually followed-collections of essays and first-person accounts of loving books and stories, teaching from preschool to postgraduate students, painting and letter writing, and facing inevitable life transitions.

This book, however, preceded all the others. It marked her continuation of the simple task of starting at the beginning and writing down what happens in a given life and then taking a stab at what it might have meant. The answer to both is "quite a lot" for anyone paying attention-as Anne tried to do-across generations, within the family and beyond, to the wider world.

River Journeys began as a simple chronicle for friends and family, yet it's also a story of negotiating the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century changes that buffeted so many American families-a fitting read for anyone who might be curious about how a quiet, remarkable person navigated along the way.