Downstream from Here: A Foreign Correspondent Discovers Home - Hardcover

Eisendrath, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1965278175 ISBN 13: 9781965278178

Publisher: Mission Point Press, 2025

Synopsis

That Troublesome Old Family Place? That's Where Passions Shape a Future...

After plum assignments in Washington, London, Paris, and Buenos Aires, TIME magazine correspondent Charles Eisendrath walks away from the glamor. It isn’t that he got it wrong—the career, the stories—it’s the realization that getting it right in terrorism zones can lead to something far worse for his young family. Kidnappings, home bombings, and “disappearances” were all too common.

Taking a leave of absence, he moves his family to a 146-acre farm in Northern Michigan. But this is no retreat. Journalism, he realizes, is, looking in windows at what others do. Eisendrath lunges out the door to a broader life and doesn't look back.

He plants a cherry orchard, invents a grill James Beard calls “brilliantly thought out,” starts a maple syrup company and teaches his sons to hunt and fish. His journalism now takes the form of founding the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists and Wallace House at the University of Michigan, securing a $60 million endowment to ensure permanence.

This memoir captures a life of action covering wars and recovering from a jungle plane crash; analyzing the personalities of brook trout and why a pet octopus seems to help with a son's stammer. In this book, he tethers it all to a farm alive with the past as it helps fashion his family's future.

Ken Auletta of The New Yorker calls it, “An amazing, beautifully written memoir.” Actor Jeff Daniels says, “Prepare to be inspired.”

About this title

About the Author

After attending Yale University, Charles R. Eisendrath dropped out of law school to become a journalist. He served as a TIME correspondent in Washington, London, and Paris, bureau chief in Buenos Aires, and professor at the University of Michigan. His freelance work has appeared on NPR and in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, International Herald-Tribune, and The Atlantic. At the University of Michigan, Eisendrath founded Wallace House Center for Journalists. It includes the Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowships, one of the nation's leading mid-career professional programs, and the Livingston Awards, widely known as "the Pulitzer Prize for the young." Director of the program from 1986-2016, he raised a $60 million endowment to permanently support the fellowships and was founding director of the awards.In the culinary world, Eisendrath is known for founding Grillworks, Inc. and the patented device that helped reintroduce Americans to cooking over wood. The company is now owned by his eldest son, Ben. His son Mark, two years younger, is an artist. Eisendrath and his wife, Julia, live in Ann Arbor and East Jordan, Michigan.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mission Point Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1965278175
• ISBN 13: 9781965278178
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Eisendrath Mark
• Number of pages: 310