24 Jun
Condé Nast Traveller – June 2008
So I want to catch up on two jewels missed earlier this year. Chief among these is Sarah Anderson’s Halfway to Venus: A One Armed Journey. Anderson lost an arm as a young girl; as an adult she set up the Travel Bookshop, in 1979. These and other life experiences have fuelled a wonderful book that, in the course of the author’s search for the ‘lost’ arm, takes in a trip to Lourdes and a one-armed dove hunt in Texas. Halfway to Venus is also a fascinating cultural history – a look at how arms are portrayed in history, literature and art – and an investigation through phantom limbs and prosthetics into ideas of absence and difference.