“It’s a wrenching chronicle of a disaster that, six years later, still seems incomprehensible … Any writer could compile a laundry list of the horrors that come in the wake of a disaster; Parry’s book is not that. He takes his readers deep into Tohoku, ‘a remote, marginal, faintly melancholy place, the symbol of a rural tradition that, for city dwellers, is no more than a folk memory’ … Parry writes about the survivors with sensitivity and a rare kind of empathy; he resists the urge to distance himself from the pain in an attempt at emotional self-preservation. The result is a book that’s brutally honest, and at times difficult to read … Ghosts of the Tsunami is a brilliant chronicle of one of the modern world’s worst disasters, but it’s also a necessary act of witness. The stories Parry tells are wrenching, and he refuses to mitigate the enormity of the tsunami with false optimism or saccharine feel-good anecdotes. Above all, it’s a beautiful meditation on grief.”
–Michael Schaub, NPR, October 26, 2017
Read more of Michael’s reviews here
