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Vagabond Memoirs combines travel and memoir-the linear, horizontal travels to another geographic space and the vertical one of Karber's coming of age interior life. The book begins with a road trip to his ancestral home in the piney woods of Arkansas, pauses to take account of the world of baby boomers and the Jim Crow South in the '50s, and takes off in the mid-60s with his teenage delinquency and a judge giving him a choice of several months in jail or the army. Having just turned 17 years old, Karber chose the army amidst the Vietnam War and served twenty-one months at a radio reconnaissance post on the Laotian border in northern Thailand. Upon his return to the States and civilian life h...
As spring and summer vacations beckon, this book invites and incites a whole new approach to travel. "Postmarks from a Political Traveler" 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 trip...
From life along the Tigris River in the 1970s to the ongoing Arab Spring uprisings, Phil Karber has witnessed decades of change throughout the Middle East. Fear and Faith in Paradise draws on his wealth of experience to sketch a timely and compelling portrait of the region throughout history. Going beyond the endless images of terrorism and war, he challenges pervasive stereotypes of Muslims and delves into the living history and cultures of Arabs, Turks, Kurds, Persians, Jews, Tunisians, Moroccans, Armenians, and others. Seamlessly moving between past and present, Karber skillfully develops two overarching themes: How America's footprint can be shifted from a military to a humanitarian emphasis and how fear is used as a cudgel by today's monotheistic leaders to sacrifice the faithful. Whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, they all invoke their own vision of paradise, often as incentive, in hopeless conflicts that seem doomed to be repeated. Karber's down-to-earth writing vividly conveys the region's charm and beauty against a backdrop of power struggles among competing faiths, nationalisms, and outside forces.
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