Beautiful Unseen (eBook)

Amidst the fog of San Francisco, a debut author reflects on his brother's life and suicide in this ';painful, intimate, and exquisitely written' memoir (Peter Orner). In San Francisco, the summer fog blows inland off the ocean and the landscape changes from moment to moment. Amidst this ever-changing sea of fog, thirty year old Kyle Boelte struggles to remember his brother Kris, who committed suicide in their family's Denver home when Boelte was just thirteen. In a dual narrative that weaves together climate and personal history, Boelte explores letters, notes, newspaper articles, and his own memory to tell the story of his brother's short life while also investigating the science behind San Francisco's omnipresent fog. Boelte's search takes him from San Francisco Bay circa 1901, when the fog was responsible for routinely sinking steamships, to a cavernous medical library where he studies the grim details of asphyxiation and death by hanging; from the redwood forests where scientists are now learning about the fog's ability to sustain life, to a beat-up cardboard box containing memories of his long-dead brother. The Beautiful Unseen is a ';slim book of startling prose' that ';slips between past and present, inner life and outer, seamlessly and beautifully' to tell a story of loss at an early age, the impermanence of memory, the science of fog, and the history of San Francisco (Darin Strauss).