Let the Great World Spin
Great World Spin By Colum McCann Review Read this book on a device on my bike trip from Minneapolis to Chicago. It is a book that travels back and forth through time and place as if straddling a tightrope. A tightrope is one of the main focal points of the book—a story that spans the World Trade Towers and a dozen lives in between. It begins and ends in Ireland, but the majority of action takes place in Brooklyn. Prostitutes waiting for customers under a highway overpass and the kind-hearted priest who doesn’t exactly save them, far from it, but offers them a place where they can pee, clean up, if even momentarily before going back out to hustle. It seems like such a mundane thing, hardly a luxury or hand up/out. A service so small and yet human. “The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backwards.” McCann through a series of sketches, some spanning 50 or more pages, ...