A
kind of a Love Song
A memoir consisting of 56 true stories of adventures, and mixing with the local people, in 17 countries, primarily in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, as the author and his late wife traveled the world. The book doesn’t tell you where to go, but it shows you how to do it, how to have memories that will never fade. The book is addressed to two small children too young to have known their grandmother, who died of cancer. Proceeds go to an educational fund for these two children.
Illustrations – Includes 22 maps, 18 color and 26 black and white photos, and selected historical illustrations.
The text is printed in this size for easy readability.
Commentary:
Dwight Taylor’s A kind of a Love Song is a charming, touching tribute to his late wife, beautifully written as an account of their travels together, far from the beaten path. Marvelously well-read, and possessed with an uncanny eye for detail and a memory for arresting conversations held with citizens of every part of the globe, Taylor presents a tour de force that combines original perceptions of ancient cities and landscapes with the sometimes turbulent realities of what the world’s forgotten kingdoms and territories have become. To read A kind of a Love Song is to accompany a sensitive, inquisitive couple as they travel to places of which most of us can only dream. As they tenaciously and successfully deal with everything from astonishing encounters with red tape, to finding previously hidden clues to the location of great battles of the distant past, the reader will smile, and learn, and be enjoyably enriched by every page.
Charles Bracelen Flood, prize-winning and best
selling author: Grant and
Sherman; Lee-the Last Years; Hitler-the Path to Power; The War of the
Innocents; Rise,
and Fight Again
Traveling becomes more than sightseeing in Dwight Taylor’s beautifully written account of journeys to exotic places. Endowing his stories with imagination, a knack for bonding local people and a sense of history he especially brings to life the classical world of Asia Minor. Infusing it all is a touching, but not all sentimental, true love story of two mature people who share these adventures. A lovely book.
James W. Michaels, Editor Emeritus, Forbes Magazine
Adventurous and unconventional, Dwight Taylor takes you through seventeen countries from Scotland to the Spice Islands, and from 3000 B.C., in present day Iraq, to yesterday. You meet Everyman: from Homer and Sappho to the Nile River antiquities guard who could have shot him, to an Arab money changer who thought he was Hamlet, to the soviets whose only map of Moscow intentionally mislocated everything but the city boundary… even to a wild baboon with him in the car. And if you have an ounce of interest in archaeology, this book will convert it to a pound or two. Refreshing different: crudite, diverse, and greatly entertaining, with wry humor all along the way.
David
Stronach, Emeritus Professor of Near East Studies, University of
California, Berkeley
2006/434 pages/paper $