Contemporary Authors

• A Train through Time: A Life, Real and Imagined - 2017 Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, CA

• American Profile - http://americanprofile.com/articles/pbs-elizabeth-farnsworth-newshour/

  NewsHour' Correspondent Elizabeth Farnsworth
  By American Profile on January 20, 2002
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  Elizabeth Farnsworth, who is on PBS' The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, is one of our favorites. What can you tell us about her?
  —Thelma P., Utah

  Farnsworth joined the news program as a contributing correspondent in 1984 and became chief correspondent and principal substitute anchor in 1995. She became a senior correspondent in October 1999, concentrating on foreign affairs and the arts from The NewsHour office in San Francisco. Farnsworth also has produced and directed several documentaries for PBS. Born in Minneapolis and raised in Topeka, Kan., Farnsworth knew at an early age that she wanted to be a foreign correspondent. She graduated from Middlebury College in 1965 and earned her master's degree in history from Stanford University. She is married to attorney Charles Farnsworth and has two children and two grandchildren. In her free time, she likes to garden, ski, play piano, and read poetry. "I'm much more lighthearted than I appear on camera," she says. "People say I'm more irreverent than I appear to be." Farnsworth lives in Berkeley, Calif.

• Counterpoint Press - http://www.counterpointpress.com/authors/elizabeth-farnsworth/

  ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH

  ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH is a filmmaker, foreign correspondent, and former chief correspondent and principal substitute anchor of PBS’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Her 2008 documentary, The Judge and the General, co-directed with Patricio Lanfranco, aired on television around the world, winning many awards. She has reported from Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile, Haiti, Iraq, and Iran, among other places. She grew up in Topeka, Kansas, where her ancestors were pioneers. She has a B.A. from Middlebury College and an M.A. in history from Stanford University. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, attorney Charles E. Farnsworth. They have two married children and six grandchildren.
  She has received four Emmy nominations and is a recipient of the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award, which is often considered the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer, which is also administered by Columbia University. Her website is Elizabeth-Farnsworth.com.
  She is the author of:
  A Train Through Time: A Life, Real and Imagined

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Farnsworth

  Elizabeth Farnsworth
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Elizabeth Farnsworth
  Born 1943
  Minneapolis, Minnesota
  Nationality American
  Occupation Journalist and author
  Notable work A Train Through Time – A Life, Real and Imagined

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  Elizabeth Farnsworth (born 1943) is an American journalist and author of the memoir, A Train Through Time – A Life, Real and Imagined (February, 2017).

  Early life and education[edit]
  Farnsworth was born Elizabeth Fink in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and grew up in Topeka, Kansas, where her family arrived as pioneers in the 19th century.

  Farnsworth is a graduate of Topeka High School and Middlebury College, where she graduated magna cum laude. She earned an M.A. in Latin American History from Stanford University and lived in Peru and Chile for extended periods.

  Farnsworth first appeared regularly on national public television in 1975 as a panelist covering Latin America on World Press, produced by KQED in San Francisco. In the 1970s and 80’s she contributed articles to the San Francisco Chronicle, Foreign Policy, and Mother Jones, among other publications. With Stephen Talbot she wrote a column, Dispatches, for The Nation. With Eric Leenson and Richard Feinberg, she wrote about the economic blockade against Chile during the years Salvador Allende was president. That research became a book, El Bloqueo Invisible, in Buenos Aires in 1973.[1]

  In 1984 she became a contributing correspondent to the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, later known as The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. In 1995 she became chief correspondent and principal substitute anchor, and in 1999 became senior correspondent and head of the San Francisco office.[2] She has reported in print and on television from the following countries, among others: Vietnam, Cambodia, South Korea, Japan, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Israel (the West Bank and Gaza), Botswana, Malawi and Turkey.

  Her 2001 four-part series on the AIDS crisis (produced by Joanne Elgart Jennings) received the 2001 Silver World Medal from the New York Festivals and a national Emmy nomination.

  In 1983 Farnsworth co-produced (with Stephen Talbot) The Gospel and Guatemala, which won a Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco Film Festival and aired on PBS. In 1990 she co-produced (with John Knoop) Thanh’s War, which aired on PBS and won a Cine Golden Eagle.

  In 2008 Farnsworth and co-producer/director Patricio Lanfranco released The Judge and the General, a feature-length documentary film about the personal transformation of Chilean Judge Juan Guzmán as he tries to bring Augusto Pinochet to justice for human rights crimes.[3] The film opened at the San Francisco Film Festival, aired on public television on POV, and garnered a 2008 Directors Guild of America nomination for Outstanding Directorial Achievement[4] and a 2008 Emmy award nomination for Best Historical Documentary.[5] The Judge and the General won a 2010 duPont-Columbia Award for excellence in broadcast journalism.[6]

  Farnsworth was a Fellow at the Center for Art Environment of the Nevada Art Museum from 2010 to 2013.[7] In June 2013 an exhibit, Fracked: North Dakota’s Oil boom, featuring photographs by Terry Evans and written by Farnsworth, opened at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. After a year, the exhibit traveled to the North Dakota Museum of Art, and since then it has traveled to other cities in North Dakota.

  She is a former member of the Board of Directors of the World Affairs Council of Northern California and currently a member of that organization’s Advisory Committee.[8] She also serves on the Advisory Committee of the UC Berkeley School of Law Human Rights Center.[9]

  She received an honorary doctorate degree from Colby College in 2002.[10]

  https://www.fieldmuseum.org/at-the-field/exhibitions/fractured-north-dakotas-oil-boom

  https://placesjournal.org/article/dakota-is-everywhere/

  https://www.nevadaart.org/author/terry-evans/

  http://westwindproductions.org/en/filmmakers/default.html

• Elizabeth Farnsworth Home Page - http://elizabeth-farnsworth.com/author.html

  About the Author

  Elizabeth Farnsworth is a filmmaker, foreign correspondent, and former chief correspondent and principal substitute anchor of PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Her 2008 documentary, The Judge and the General, co-directed with Patricio Lanfranco, aired on television around the world winning many awards. She has reported on television and in print from Cambodia, Vietnam, Botswana, Chile, Peru, Haiti, Iraq, and Iran, among other places.

  She grew up in Topeka, Kansas, where her ancestors were pioneers. She has a B.A. from Middlebury College and an M.A. in history from Stanford University. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, attorney Charles E. Farnsworth. They have two married children and six grandchildren. She has received three Emmy nominations and is a recipient of the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award, often considered the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer, also administered by Columbia University. In 1970 she helped produce (and acted in) Que Hacer, a feature film about the election of Salvador Allende in Chile. In 1983, she co-produced The Gospel and Guatemala with Steven Talbot. It aired on PBS in 1984. Thanh's War, which she co-produced with John Knoop, aired on PBS in 1991.

  Farnsworth serves on the advisory board of the Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley School of Law, and the advisory committee of the World Affairs Council of Northern California.

QUOTED: "She's such an able storyteller and her tale of loss ... is so universal.

A Train Through Time: A Life, Real and
Imagined
Publishers Weekly.
263.50 (Dec. 5, 2016): p62.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
A Train Through Time: A Life, Real and Imagined
Elizabeth Farnsworth. Counterpoint, $25 (156p) ISBN 978-1-61902-843-2
Filmmaker and PBS foreign correspondent Farnsworth packs a life's worth of pain and self-discovery into a slim
memoir that fuses fiction and memory. The narrative shifts between a train trip nine-year-old Farnsworth took with her
father in 1953 (from Topeka to San Francisco, following the death of her mother) and various conflict zones the adult
Farnsworth covered as a journalist, from Chile on the brink of the coup in the 1970s to Iraq in 2003. The scenes of
destruction abroad are chillingly real--Farnsworth describes, in haunting detail, meeting Chilean parents whose
children were "disappeared" by Pinochet's regime and likely met grisly ends--but she admits at the very end of the
book that the train journey is largely a product of her imagination, a way for her to explore the deep sense of loss she
still carries for her mother. In her narrative, the train becomes stranded in the snow for days and she and another little
girl learn that a famous horse is on board and get to ride it. Readers will forgive Farnsworth's admission that she "didn't
resist the imagining when it began" only because she's such an able storyteller and her tale of loss, suffused with a
child's desire to attach meaning and reasoning to death, is so universal. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"A Train Through Time: A Life, Real and Imagined." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 62. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224900&it=r&asid=52b8ae26d1acf88aacb6103c0e412995.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475224900

QUOTED: "Filmmaker and former PBS foreign correspondent Farnsworth makes her literary debut in an impressionistic memoir that moves back and forth through time."
"often-moving memoir."

8/12/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502567613165 2/2
Farnsworth, Elizabeth: A TRAIN THROUGH
TIME
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Farnsworth, Elizabeth A TRAIN THROUGH TIME Counterpoint (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 2, 14 ISBN: 978-1-
61902-843-2
Filmmaker and former PBS foreign correspondent Farnsworth makes her literary debut in an impressionistic memoir
that moves back and forth through time from her childhood in Topeka, Kansas, to her work in "conflicted places" such
as Cambodia, Chile, Haiti, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam.The narrative also moves in and out of reality and imagination:
as the author reveals in the last pages of the book, one of the surreal childhood events she narrates never happened. Her
mother's death, though, did occur, when she was 9, and the loss was shattering. Although Farnsworth knew her mother
was suffering, her father told her that her mother was "gone," leading her to hope that she would return. Shortly after
her death, Farnsworth and her father traveled by train to California to visit relatives, and the child searched for her
mother every time the train stopped. In her dramatic rendering of the trip, their train becomes stranded in an avalanche
in the Sierra Mountains, and she finds a white stallion, cared for by a cowboy, being transported to Los Angeles to
perform in a TV series. These invented scenes--the author riding the powerful horse through the train's cars and the
train's peril, which had occurred the year before--emphasize her emotional vulnerability at the time. Although the
episode felt to her "as if it actually happened," it confuses the narrative. Real peril occurred repeatedly in her work: she
reports interviewing mothers of "disappeared" children in Chile; discovering that Nixon and Kissinger acted to
undermine Allende and bolster Pinochet; interviewing leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood after 9/11; fearing for the
safety of her crew while reporting from Israel and the West Bank; and reflecting on the morality of news reporting. "I
don't believe I have the right to decide what story is worth another person's life," she concludes. Piecing together
fragments of the past in this often moving memoir helps the author understand how she "found relief from self and
sorrow by concentrating on the lives of others."
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Farnsworth, Elizabeth: A TRAIN THROUGH TIME." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865798&it=r&asid=4f9e6f78546b21f0a31d9ba66b749df7.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469865798

• SF Gate
  http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/A-Train-Through-Time-by-Elizabeth-11007766.php
  Word count: 911

  QUOTED: "A Train Through Time is a moving and vivid account."
  "At 150 pages, the book itself is slight in length and, at times, feels sketched in rather than fully realized. But like all good memoirs, A Train Through Time offers the reader an opportunity to 'ride along' with an intelligent and reflective narrator as she inventories her life and offers us an insider’s view of some of the most morally challenging moments in our country’s history."

  ‘A Train Through Time,’ by Elizabeth Farnsworth
  By Zoe FitzGerald Carter Updated 2:54 pm, Wednesday, March 22, 2017

  "A Train Through Time" Photo: Counterpoint
  Photo: Counterpoint
  IMAGE 1 OF 2 "A Train Through Time"
  As a contributing correspondent and part-time anchor on the PBS “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” for much of the 1980s and 1990s, Elizabeth Farnsworth covered some of the most politically explosive stories of our time, including the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the rise of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, the overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti and the AIDS epidemic.
  Farnsworth also produced a number of award-winning documentaries, including a full-length feature on Chilean Judge Juan Guzmán as he attempts to bring Pinochet to justice for human rights violations. The film, “The Judge and the General” (2008), was also a catalyst for Farnsworth to begin excavating her past, a process she artfully captures in her new memoir, “A Train Through Time: A Life, Real and Imagined.”
  The book opens in a dark editing room at Skywalker Ranch with Farnsworth and her colleagues scrambling to finish the Guzmán documentary in time for the San Francisco International Film Festival. In an exhausted daze, she watches a sequence in which the judge first finds human remains, the chilling evidence of human slaughter 30 years earlier.
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  As the editor plays the exhumation scene over and over, Farnsworth flees the room, seeking the reassuring presence of Tik-tok, Dorothy’s mechanical friend from Walter Murch’s 1985 film “Return to Oz,” whose likeness is on display in Skywalker’s atrium.
  “Stepping over a protective barrier and brushing plants aside, I kneeled in front of of Tik-tok and hugged him. Then time did something I can’t explain. I felt a jolt, like electricity, and saw myself as the girl who had loved Oz books half a century before. That girl asked, ‘What sent you on a path through death and destruction?’”
  Having set the memoir in motion, Farnsworth sets out to answer her own question, fitting her memories together “like bones from an exhumation,” searching for the threads between her current life as a journalist and her younger self. Like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” Elizabeth lived in Kansas, lost her bearings and was forced to go out into the world in search of answers.
  The journey begins with an epic train ride in 1955, during which Farnsworth and her father travel from their home in Topeka to Santa Barbara. As father and daughter ride west across the prairies, 9-year-old Elizabeth searches the faces of all the women she sees, both on and off the train. Soon we come to understand that Elizabeth’s mother has recently died and that, thanks to her father’s well-meaning but misguided wish to protect her, her mother’s death came as both a mystery and a shock to the young Elizabeth.
  The rest of the book toggles back and forth between scenes from the train ride — a new friend, a mysterious white horse — and scenes from Farnsworth’s life as a journalist reporting from various hot spots around the globe. Always there is death, and mystery: the “disappeared” in Chile; the death of a beloved handler in Iraq; the story of Thanh Pham, who lost his mother and grandmother as a child when his village in Vietnam was bombed by American soldiers and who is the subject of Farnsworth’s documentary “Thanh’s War.”
  The two story lines intersect emotionally when the train is stopped by an avalanche and, as everyone around her panics, Elizabeth feels only relief. “Everyone around me was as confused and upset as I’d been for months. I wouldn’t have to pretend anymore that everything was alright.” This moment functions as a kind of emotional blueprint for her later willingness to put herself in danger, to report from the “edge of loss.”
  While “A Train Through Time” is a moving and vivid account into what drove this accomplished journalist into the darkest corners of humanity, this is not a “tell-all.” We learn little about Farnsworth’s adult life away from journalism, and some of her scenes, such as her interview with Henry Kissinger in 2001 about the U.S. support of Pinochet, would have benefited from more detail.
  At 150 pages, the book itself is slight in length and, at times, feels sketched in rather than fully realized. But like all good memoirs, “A Train Through Time” offers the reader an opportunity to “ride along” with an intelligent and reflective narrator as she inventories her life and offers us an insider’s view of some of the most morally challenging moments in our country’s history.
  Zoe FitzGerald Carter is the author of “Imperfect Endings: A Story of Love, Loss and Letting Go.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com
  A Train Through Time
  A Life, Real and Imagined
  By Elizabeth Farnsworth
  (Counterpoint; 159 pages; $25)