2013: Memoirs of a Writer - A Year of Travel, Interviews and Reflections on Life

On New Year’s Day 2013, Sheldon Webster was watching the college bowl games from his man cave in Birmingham, Alabama feeling frustrated that the Khmer Rouge war tribunal in Phenom Penh continued. Being unable to finish his third historical novel, House of Kampuchea, Cambodia’s CIA Killing Fields that required six years of research and travel, he felt the inspiration to write 2013: Memoires of a Writer. The author would begin by recording significant events which occurred during the year of 2013, either planned or unplanned. He would interview some exceptional Americans and write their stories with a sprinkling of personal emails for humor.


In the spring of 2013, Webster traveled through five West Africa countries and reported on the mayhem of African life. That fall, he traveled through nine former Soviet Republics in Eurasia from the Baltic Sea down to the Black and Caspian. The author opines on the two decades of post-Communist governance, or lack thereof, along with geopolitical beginning of Ukraine Civil War and the failed attempts to clean up the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

With his “fiction enabler” disabled, this book interjects the author’s quasi-autobiography into one year of his most adventurous life of travel to seven continents, 134 countries as an army officer, CPA, mountaineer and writer. The book retraces the life of Ernest Hemingway’s ghost, Webster’s literary mentor whose footsteps he followed. Drawing upon forty years of diaries and family correspondence, Webster writes about his adrenaline addiction which has taken him into war zones, the beginning of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, and travels down the Niger River to Timbuktu investigating the Afghanistan opium trail.

During the following year 2014 Webster followed up with his political opinions, slightly right of center, endorsing neither national political party. There are no hints of libertarianism or contrarianism in this book, just Webster’s patriotic challenge to America’s silent majority to rebel against the Washington establishment. “Americans must challenge the Washington/Military-Industrial conspiracy and crony capitalism,” he warns, “or listen naïvely to bias cable news propagandists.” Webster encourages Americans to engage in meaningful political debate in order to keep America great and fiscally sound for future generations.