Tim Bascom will do a reading from his new memoir at the Des Moines Art Center. The event starts at 1:00 pm. Barbara Briggie Smith links the book to the current exhibit “Field, Road, Cloud: Art and Africa.”
Running to the Fire has been in development for years, and it picks up from Basom's last memoir: Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia. His missionary parents suddenly decide to take their children back into Ethiopia--from a small town in Kansas--only this time the Emperor has been overthrown and the country is in the middle of a violent Marxist Revolution, not unlike the revolutionary upheavals that have been rippling across North Africa since the beginning of the “Arab Spring.”
One reviewer has this to say about the book:
“We're fortunate that Bascom brings us these intimate tales from his young life spent as a son of American missionaries, during the trying times of an Ethiopian Marxist Revolution. This is a lyrical chronicle, filled with nostalgia, longing, dignity and soulfulness. A good book brings the things far close to our heart. Running to the Fire does exactly that and much more." --Da Chen, NYT bestselling memoirist and awarding winning novelist.