This collection of travel letters by the American writer Howard Wolf is based on the author’s 1990 around- the- world trip that took him to Singapore, Malaysia, India, Turkey, and Greece. These unset letters make up something like an epistolary autobiography woven from a global fabric. wolf looks at the American scene — family, education, self-knowledge, and culture — against the backgrounds of the Malay Peninsula, India ( the largest section of the book), Greece, and Turkey, Between his departure from Western New York and his return to Florida, the author searches for " versions of home." The Letters are closely related in time and recurring themes; and, all together, a personal universe of characters is portrayed. A Version of Home : Letters From The World is not an experimental or Post-Modern "text." At the same time, the genre of travel letters, with its inevitable shifts of focus as the traveler moves from place to place, gives the book a contemporary feel. The author’s commitment to irreducible human experience sets him against recent Deconstructive trends. As the world seems to be moving away from the the art of Nuclear Holocaust, and greater openness between nations becomes possible at the end of the 20th Century. A Version of Home : Letters From The World is a book that makes real enhanced opportunities for communication between persons around the world. It is a book that discovers the common roots of the human tree and lets us take comfort beneath its canopy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Howard Wolf
Dr. Howard Wolf, (b.1936) Professor of American and English Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo, U.S.A., is the co-author (with Roger Porter) of the Voice within: Reading and Writing Autobiography (1973); and the author of Forgive The Father : A Memoir of Changing Generations (1978); Upper Manhattan : A Family Album -- poems (1990); A Version of Home : Letters from the Worlds (1992) and This is India : Recording Reality Itself (1992). Wolf has published more than 175 literary and cultural essays, short stories, poems and social commentaries. He is a distinguished member of the PEN International (American Centre) and has been a fellow of both, the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Centre for the Arts. In 1998, Professor Wolf visited India for the first time where he participated in the American Civilization Course at American Studies Research Centre (ASRC), Hyderabad. He returned in 1990 as an ' American Participant ' under the auspices of the USIS and gave lectures in eight Indian Cities : Chennai, Calicut, Trivandrum, Berhampur, Bhubaneshwar, Calcutta, Hyderabad and Delhi. All of Professor Wolf's books deal, in one way or another , with what he calls " the autobiographical impulses in American Life. " He is interested in the value and use of personal writing and believes that this idiom and genre, which has deep roots in the consonant with democratic ideals of a world-wide nature. Another forthcoming book of Howard Wolf is : Essays on Crisis of Humanism in Contemporary Culture.
There are no reviews yet.