%1

Reviewing Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings (Pantheon) in the New York Review of Books (January 20), Larry McMurtry concentrates on the act of saying good-bye. Raban, a skilled writer of travelogues and an adventurous traveler, tells his three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Julia that he is leaving for 21 days. He reflects that to Julia it “could as well be 21 eternities”—words that will ring in the ears and sting the consciences of many who travel frequently, leaving their families behind.