Postmarks from a Political Traveler

As spring and summer vacations beckon, this book invites and incites a whole new approach to travel. "e;Postmarks from a Political Traveler"e; is a series of travel recollections confronting the troubling topics of roots and racism, polar bears and climate change, anti-Americanism, and the war in Afghanistan. The book opens with the story of the author s experience growing up in the Jim Crow South, traveling in apartheid South Africa, and living in the post-apartheid South Africa of 2009 and 2010. It explores the not-so-dissimilar roots and racism of the United States and South Africa, as well as the cross-fertilization of ideas between the two countries. The next installment chronicles two trips to Churchill, Manitoba, where the planet s largest population of polar bears congregate each October. It recounts the dramatic changes that have occurred in both the human and the polar bear communities in just the last decade and shows how the bears have become an Arctic version of the proverbial canary in the coalmine. Then the book shifts to the author s journey back to the United States on a German freighter with a rabidly anti-American captain. Woven into this account of life aboard a long haul ship are threads of the author s travels and anti-American encounters over a decade of living in Africa and Asia. The book concludes with reflections on trips to Afghanistan in 2004 and in 2012, describing the effects of war and conflict zone politics on women, education, refugees, and aid workers. What ties these episodes together is the author s commitment to social justice and to changing the world through travel and writing that is, affirming travel as a political act."e;

Introduction; Part I Down at the Blue Lagoon; Chapter 1 Two Minds, Two Worlds, One Country; Chapter 2 Lest We Forget; Chapter 3 Go Hunting Where the Ducks Are; Chapter 4 The Cross-Fertilization of Attitudes and Practices; Chapter 5 Religion, Education, Poverty, Xenophobia, and Rainbows; Part II Polar Bears; Chapter 6 The Hudson Bay Train to Churchill; Chapter 7 A Blue-Ribbon Day and a Blue Moon; Chapter 8 Canaries in the Coal Mine; Part III An Anti-American Age; Chapter 9 Beauty Is As Beauty Does; Chapter 10 Pirates at Sea; Chapter 11 Tiger Cages and Torture; Chapter 12 We Believe; Therefore It Must Be True; Chapter 13 Mooning the Russian Army; Chapter 14 Bush, Brickbats, and Bouquets in the Koreas; Chapter 15 Welcome Home, Man; Part IV Return to Kabul; Chapter 16 Testing Our Resolve; Chapter 17 An Improvised Excursion through Kabul; Chapter 18 Fortress America and an Army of Aid Workers; Chapter 19 Let Me Die in My Footsteps;