In Search of an America: An Introvert on the Road - Hardcover

Bethlenfalvay, Gabor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1462880495 ISBN 13: 9781462880492

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation, 2011

About this title

About the Author

Born in Hungary before World War II, the author spends his early childhood in an upper-middle class milieu that he remembers as his Garden of Eden. Days before the Red Army overruns his hometown, he and his family flee west through to end up in a small village in Germany. Six years of exile there include long periods of cultural growth in school, until emigration to the United States becomes possible. Day labor at assembly lines in Chicago and in Omaha is the author's first introduction to the New World. From there his convoluted path leads him to service in the military, then to school to study physics. When that becomes a dead end, his road leads him back to the Army and from there finally to a doctorate in biology, after experiences of a tour in Vietnam makes him resign his commission. The repeated back-and-forth between academia and the military and between Europe and the USA help him to explore and compare religious, political, sociological and scientific attitudes and patterns of thinking in the Old and New Worlds. He learns to view his new home with critical detachment. In retirement, after years of work on the ways leading to sustainability in agriculture, he finally realizes that the long road that led him to the fog-shrouded mountain outside his study's window in San Luis Obispo was nothing but a search for a utopia, 'an America,' that of his childhood dreams.

Edition details

• Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1462880495
• ISBN 13: 9781462880492
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 540