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YOU CAN GET THERE FROM HERE by Shirley MacLaine

YOU CAN GET THERE FROM HERE

By

Pub Date: March 24th, 1975
Publisher: Norton

This picks up from there -- Don't Fall Off the Mountain -- with the same openness of mind and heart that made that book so widely appealing. If it does less well, it will be because it's a little less of a book in terms of experience (only four years) and also because it may be saying more which Mr. and Mrs. Everybody won't want to hear. Namely that she found in China qualities of serenity, humanity and honesty, also call it equality, so shortchanged here. The memoir starts in 1970 when Hollywood ""bottomed out"" along with the rest of the country; Shirley went on to make her disastrous TV series (she hated both character and scripts from the onset) and then participated in the McGovern campaign, another ""form of theater,"" with its disheartening performance and result. She made a short visit home (most affecting) and then was asked to head a delegation on a four weeks' visit through China. China, since her childhood, had always been the lodestar -- alluring and inaccessible; on this trip she and the others make a ""journey to the interior,"" mostly theirs, with mixed effects. Her book then is a statement of sorts -- and once again it connects openly in its candor, immediacy and receptiveness.