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The End of the Rainy Season: Discovering My Family's Hidden Past in Brazil - Soft Skull Press, 2015

"FAMILIES ARE SO MIXED NOWADAYS. INDEED, AS A RULE, EVERYBODY TURNS OUT TO BE SOMEBODY ELSE." --Oscar Wilde

 

When I began investigating the supposed murder of a family member in the Amazon, I had no idea how applicable Wilde's quip would prove to be. 

 

I grew up being told that Walter Lindberg, the man who raised my father, had been killed in the late 1920's while exploring the Amazon, looking for gold and making maps. Many years later, my search for the truth behind the story would reveal more about the family members I thought I knew than the supposedly exotic one I'd never met.

 

Readers say that The End of the Rainy Season has helped motivate them to find out the truth behind their own family secrets. Better yet, we should all speak openly and honestly within our families before emotional pain turns to harmful secrets. 

 

Through my work with an international environmental organization, I have learned that just as secrets within families often emerge later in anger or disguise, so, too, do nature's "truths" resist efforts to bury and silence them. In Brazil, destruction of the Atlantic Forest is a big reason why the major coastal cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo have water crises. Worldwide, the increase in extreme weather events due to the climate crisis is another ominous example of how nature is the most powerful avenger of them all. 

 

REVIEWS:

 

"A beautifully written, moving and distinct work."  --Library Journal

 

"This intriguing journey of self-discovery reads as an exotic travel memoir as well." -- Booklist

 

"An adventure story, a family saga, an astonishing journey of discovery and identity."  -- Kristen Iversen, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats 

 

"I was in thrall, page after page, awaiting the answers to mysteries past and present." -- Kathleen Finneran, The Tender Land: A Family Love Story

 

"In the end, many questions about the past will never be answered with any certainty, which leads to bigger questions: How do we move forward when our understanding is provisional? How do we make choices based on unstable knowledge? Ms. Lindberg's big, ambitious book traces a path through this disarray, and in doing so she provides a map for the many migrations we face in the 21st century." --Professor Stephanie Wade, East Hampton Star