A very nice side-project that has come to fruition: Fresh from the 1960s, my father's travel memories
So… Everybody I’ve interacted with along the last couple of weeks knows I’m basically just too busy. If I’m not tied up with stuff regarding my privacy/anonymity project at the university, I am trying to get the DebConf scheduling, or trying to catch up with my perpetual enemy, mail backlog. Of course, there’s also my dayjob — Yes, it’s vacation time, but I’m a sysadmin, and it’s not like I want to give software updates much of a vacation! Of course, my family goes to Argentina for a couple of weeks while I go to DebConf, so there’s quite a bit of work in that sphere as well, and… And… And… Meh, many other things better left unaccounted for ☺ But there’s one big extra I was working on, somewhat secretly, over the last two months. I didn’t want to openly spill the beans on it until it was delivered in hand to its recipient. Which happened this last weekend. So, here it is!
During the late 1960s, my father studied his PhD in Israel and had a posdoctoral stay in Sweden. During that time, he traveled through the world during his vacations as much as he could — This book collects his travels through Ethiopia (including what today is Eritrea), Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and India. As he took those trips, he wrote chronicles about them, and sent them to Mexico’s then-most-important newspaper (Excélsior), which published each of them in four to six parts (except for the Czechoslovakia one, which is a single page, devoted to understanding Prague two years after the Soviet repression and occupation).
I did this work starting from the yellow-to-brown and quite brittle copies of the newspaper he kept stored in a set of folders. I had the help of a digitalization professional that often works for the University, but still did a couple of cleanup and QA reads (and still, found typos… In the first printed page, in the first title! :-/ ). The text? Amazing. I thoroughly enjoyed it. He wrote the chronicles being between 23 and 27 years old, but the text flows quick and easy, delightful, as if coming from a professional writer. If you can read Spanish, I am sure you will enjoy the read:
Chronicles of a backpacker in a more naïve world
Why am I publishing this now, amid the work craze I’ve run into? Because my father is turning 75 year old next weekend. We rushed the mini-party for him (including the book-as-a-present) as we wanted my kids to deliver the present, and they are now in a plane to South America.
The book run I did was quite limited — Just 30 items, to give away to family and close friends. I can, of course, print more on demand. But I want to take this work to a publisher — There are many reasons I believe these youth chronicles are of general interest.
Attachments
cronicas_de_un_mochilero.pdf (25903 KB)
libro_bwolf.jpg (64 KB)
portada.jpg (368 KB)
