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The Stranger is Me: Travels and Self-Discoveries

by James A. Clapp

477 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #05-2605; ISBN 1-4120-7709-5; US$29.95, C$34.44, EUR24.60, £17.22

The Stranger is Me is a travel-memoir of self-discovery by a tour guide, and professor, who has traveled and worked in over sixty countries over the past twenty-five years.

About the Book

The Stranger is Me is a travelogue about the experience of travel with a narrative thread of self-discovery. James Clapp began foreign travel nearly three decades ago at the urging of his wife, Patricia, who accompanied him on his early journeys, sometimes with their daughters, until her tragic death a few years later. He continued to travel widely, guiding and escorting student groups and package tours, then traveling with a colleague or companions, and finally, teaching, consulting and living abroad by himself for extended periods.

These memoirs are filled with this professor's expanded understanding of the peoples and places of some sixty countries, as well as insights and revelations about the manners and mores of Americans away from home. But along the way the author has discovered that he never feels more "American" than when he is abroad. Against the backdrop of foreign cultures Clapp has come to heightened introspections about his ethnicity, his preconceptions, his fears, his vulnerability as well as self-reliance, the solitariness of a widowed, middle-aged man, abroad and alone and, often, his comic sense of himself. Being the stranger in strange lands, he has gotten to know that stranger a little better.

About the Author

James Clapp is an emeritus professor of urbanism and media who has won awards for his print and broadcast journalism and has published books and articles on cities and urban life, art, film, literature and travel. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris, and Fulbright Scholar in Hong Kong and a lecturer in Beijing and Shanghai. He is currently working on fiction and writes esays on various subjects on his website, Dragon City Journal.

Excerpts