Chameleon Days
An American Boyhood in Ethiopia
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
“Moves beyond a compelling personal story to shed radiant light on history itself . . . an essential chronicle of midcentury American idealism.” —Patricia Hampl, author of The Art of the Wasted Day
In 1964, at the age of three, Tim Bascom is thrust into a world of eucalyptus trees and stampeding baboons when his family moves from the Midwest to Ethiopia. The unflinchingly observant narrator of this memoir reveals his missionary parents’ struggles in a sometimes hostile country. Sent reluctantly to boarding school in the capital, young Tim finds that beyond the gates enclosing that peculiar, isolated world, conflict roils Ethiopian society. When secret riot drills at school are followed with an attack by rampaging students near his parents’ mission station, Tim witnesses the disintegration of his family’s African idyll as Haile Selassie’s empire begins to crumble.
Like Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Chameleon Days chronicles social upheaval through the keen yet naive eyes of a child. Bascom offers readers a fascinating glimpse of missionary life, much as Barbara Kingsolver did in The Poisonwood Bible.
“Such precision in voice earned Bascom the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Bakeless Prize, and his smartly naïve observations grow more sophisticated as the country succumbs to political unrest in the 1970s and missionary life becomes uncertain. Nostalgic but not overwrought, Bascom’s memoir is accented with casual family snapshots like ribbons on the gift of a gently captured place in time.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Bascom, son of missionaries, illuminates the Ethiopia of his childhood in this Bakeless Prize–winning memoir . . . A stirring tribute to a turbulent, beautifully evoked era.” —Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1964, three-year-old Bascom and his two brothers were uprooted from Kansas via Missouri by their missionary parents and taken to the family's personal Oz Ethiopia. Bascom's father was a doctor, and the family went first to an established mission hospital in Soddo, then in 1967 to a nascent outpost in Liemo. In Ethiopia, Tim and his older brother, Johnathan, attended boarding school American children walled in from their African neighbors. Bascom's recollections of moments and conversations from his childhood are narrated with delightfully puerile wonder. Memories of a pet chameleon, a banquet with the emperor, the descent of winged termites, a hideaway high in an avocado tree and the cry of hyenas outside the bedroom window on Christmas Eve are apt to remind adult readers of their own less exotic youthful discoveries and stoke the imaginations of older children and young adults. Such precision in voice earned Bascom the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference Bakeless Prize, and his smartly na ve observations grow more sophisticated as the country succumbs to political unrest in the 1970s and missionary life becomes uncertain. Nostalgic but not overwrought, Bascom's memoir is accented with casual family snapshots like ribbons on the gift of a gently captured place in time.
