The Longest Trip Home

How religion impacts on our lives has always been a subject of fascination to me. John Grogan, author of The Longest Trip Home (and of an earlier best-selling memoir, Marley and Me), does a fine job of showing how his parents extreme brand of Catholicism impacted on his childhood. For one thing, the family vacations were not to amusement parks or national monuments. Instead, they visited shrines and other holy sites. On one such visit his parents let their children and climbing the 28 steps to a basilica in Canada on their knees!

Some of Grogan's accounts of childhood and adolescent hijinks, and other events, seem a bit too humdrum. But the book's last hundred pages from which its title was drawn, are much more than redeeming. This section recount the author's relationship with his parents, primarily his father, in their declining days including during the last weeks of his father's life. Anyone - and that's most of us - who has seen the physical decline and death of a loved one, will appreciate Grogan's sensitive account of his experience.