The Dark Path to the River is a love story, one of strong-minded women and men who do not see the world the same. It is a story of power and politics on Wall Street and in Africa. It is also the story of two women, friends and journalists, one black and one white, of their search for empowerment and of the men who both shape and are shaped by their worlds.

Author of No marble angels, The dark path to the river.

https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL1074766A/Joanne_Leedom-Ackerman

Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist whose works of fiction include The Dark Path to the River and No Marble Angels. A former reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, Joanne is a Vice President and former International Secretary of PEN International and former Chair of PEN International's Writers in Prison Committee. She serves on the boards of the International Crisis Group, Refugees International, the International Center for Journalists, the PEN Faulkner Foundation, Poets and Writers, Words Without Borders, and the American Writers Museum. She has served on the board and as Vice President of PEN American Center, Save the Children and is an emeritus board member of Human Rights Watch and an emeritus Trustee of Johns Hopkins and Brown Universities. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Texas Institute of Letters.

Nine stories deal with individuals trying to overcome the distances that divide them.

Remember the days when phone booths stood on every street corner? If you had to make a call, you'd step inside the little booth, lift the phone off the hook, put a coin in the slot, listen for the click, push the buttons, and hear it ring? And for only 25 cents, in the quiet of the booth, you could call your grandmother, or let the office know you were running late, or get directions for a birthday party. . .

This is the story of one of the last remaining phone booths in New York City, the Phone Booth on the corner of West End Avenue and 100th. Everyone used it — from ballerinas and girl scouts, zookeepers and birthday clowns, to cellists and even secret agents! The Phone Booth was so beloved that people would sometimes wait in line to use it. Kept clean and polished, the Phone Booth was proud and happy . . . until, the day a businessman strode by and shouted into a shiny silver object, "I'll be there in ten minutes!" Soon everyone was talking into these shiny silver things, and the Phone Booth stood alone and empty, unused and dejected.