THE ROMANCE OF ELSEWHERE A Half-Century of Connecting By Sea, By Air, By Rail

by Marcelline Krafchick

$15.00 / ISBN-13: 978-1-58790-133-1 / 160 pages with 24 pages of photos / paperback / 5.25” x 8”

Travel / Memoir

ABOUT THE BOOK

A boa constrictor hijacks her shoe, she falls into an aardvark pit, paddles a reed boat across the San Francisco Bay, dodges a predator at the Metropolitan Opera, and faces the ugliness of racial segregation.  Dr. Krafchick, traveler to sixty countries, recounts awakened responses that routine would have left dormant. Krafchick conveys her wonder with eloquence, piquant humor, and the sparkle of specifics: Churchill, Merwin, Welty, Ivins, Brzezinski, King Tut, the twin towers billowing smoke, the CIA, a bombing in Italy, a hurricane at sea.  Behind a mosaic of highly readable accounts shimmers a life lived vulnerably and richly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

When not connecting overseas, Marcelline Krafchick, Ph.D., has been a tenured professor in California for nearly forty years. She has been a board member of a re-socializing program for ex-felons, president of a homeowners’ association, and a radio, stage and television actor. She was the first woman member and chair of the Hayward (California) Zoning Board and Planning Commission, and a member of three County and State Commissions. She authored World Without Heroes: The Brooklyn Novels of Daniel Fuchs (Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press) and a section on O’Neill in China (Greenwood Press), and co-edited Speaking of Rhetoric (Houghton-Mifflin). As a photographer, she exhibited for two years at California State University, East Bay. She volunteers for two local school districts, has composed questions for Princeton’s Educational Testing Service, renovated a cabin on the Big Sur Coast, and taught modeling on New York’s Park Avenue and locally to Native American young women.