UNIT TWELVE The Kindness of Strangers精品.pptVIP

* UNIT TWELVE The Kindness of Strangers Mike Mclntyre * The Author When Mike McIntyre quit his job andwent looking for the real America,something amazing happened. He found it. Mike Mcintyre, a 37-year-old journalist with a beautiful girlfriend and a decent newspaper job in San Francisco, was living the easy life when he had a sudden revelation: His life was utterly devoid of meaning. I was empty of passion. I was numb. I was halfway to nowhere. I was dead, McIntyre writes in The Kindness of * Strangers, attempting to hitchhike cross-country without money, credit cards, with nothing more than a backpack and a passion to discover himself and America. For his final destination, McIntyre picked Cape Fear, North Carolina, as a symbol for all the fears I know Ill have to conquer if Im to go the distance. McIntyre claims that he was born scared. I grew up afraid of the baby-sitter, the mailman, the birds in the trees, the next-door neighbors cat. Im afraid of the dark. Im afraid of the ocean ... the city, the wilderness. Im afraid of crowds and Im afraid to be alone. * Im afraid of failure and Im afraid of success ... But what really scares me is living. In the fall of 1994 McIntyre decided to make a final stand against his fears by walking over the Golden Gate Bridge. He set out, not sure what awaited him in a land where only serial killers and teen runaways hitchhike, a land with images of guns, greed. Miraculously a man gave him a lift north. * Through his travels, he found varying degrees of kindness in strangers from all walks of life - and discovered more about people and values and life on the road in America than hed ever thought possible. The gifts of food and shelter he received along the way were outweighed only by the touching gifts of the heart - the willingness of many he met to welcome a lonely stranger into their homes...and the discovery that sometimes those who give the most are the ones with the least to spare. In the proc