Tim Bascom

Chameleon Days (eBook, ePUB)

An American Boyhood in Ethiopia

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

"Moves beyond a compelling personal story to shed radiant light on history itself... an essential chronicle of midcentury American idealism." -Patricia Hampl, author of The Art of the Wasted Day In 1964, at the age of three, Tim Bascom is thrust into a world of eucalyptus trees and stampeding baboons when his family moves from the Midwest to Ethiopia. The unflinchingly observant narrator of this memoir reveals his missionary parents' struggles in a sometimes hostile country. Sent reluctantly to boarding school in the capital, young Tim finds that beyond the gates enclosing that peculiar, isolated world, conflict roils Ethiopian society. When secret riot drills at school are followed with an attack by rampaging students near his parents' mission station, Tim witnesses the disintegration of his family's African idyll as Haile Selassie's empire begins to crumble. Like Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Chameleon Days chronicles social upheaval through the keen yet naive eyes of a child. Bascom offers readers a fascinating glimpse of missionary life, much as Barbara Kingsolver did in The Poisonwood Bible. "Such precision in voice earned Bascom the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference Bakeless Prize, and his smartly naïve observations grow more sophisticated as the country succumbs to political unrest in the 1970s and missionary life becomes uncertain. Nostalgic but not overwrought, Bascom's memoir is accented with casual family snapshots like ribbons on the gift of a gently captured place in time." -Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Bascom, son of missionaries, illuminates the Ethiopia of his childhood in this Bakeless Prize-winning memoir... A stirring tribute to a turbulent, beautifully evoked era." -Kirkus Reviews

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: HMH Books
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. Juni 2006
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780547346472
• Artikelnr.: 37842168

Autorenporträt

Tim Bascom is the author of a collection of essays (The Comfort Trap, IVP, 1993), a novel (Squatters' Rites, New Day Press, 1990), and a memoir (Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia, Houghton Mifflin, 2006), which won the Bakeless Literary Prize in Creative Nonfiction. His childhood was split between Kansas and East Africa, where his parents worked as medical missionaries-hence his life-long fascination with literature as cultural expression. His essays, often exploring travel-related themes, have been published in literary and commercial journals that include The Missouri Review, Florida Review, Witness, Fourth Genre, Dynasty In-Flight Magazine (China Airlines), The Kansas City Star Magazine, and The Christian Science Monitor. Several have won major prizes, being selected for the anthologies Best Creative Nonfiction and Best American Travel Writing. No Bio