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| Rhododendron Wine Factory: Memoirs of a Wanderer | 
 enlarge | Author: Harold, M. Bergsma
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Category: Book
List Price: $20.49
Buy New: $12.76
You Save: $7.73 (38%)
New (16) Used (8) from $12.76
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 2440030
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 424
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 8.7 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 1425925189
Dewey Decimal Number: 355
EAN: 9781425925185
ASIN: 1425925189
Publication Date: March 28, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New! Perfect Condition!
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| Customer Reviews:
Comments May 22, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Harold Bergsma's Rhododendron Wine Factory: Memoirs of a Wanderer is a great read. His humor, his descriptive passages and keen observations rival those of Paul Theroux in his travel accounts. I particularly like the chapters on India, Nigeria, and Pakistan, where Bergsma lived and worked.
Joan B. Manley, author of She Flew No Flags (Houghton Mifflin,Co) 1995
Book Summary April 19, 2006
The author tells stories about his international wandering. In India he writes about his childhood and growing up in boarding school. He experiences frustrations of a child living with a dorm bully. His story "The Year I Became a Thief describes his humorous rationale for his resulting strange thefts. In "Bears' Cave" he describes a terrifying cave exploration with his older brother where they almost lose their lives.
Bergsma resided twelve years in Nigeria. He made close friends with many of the traditional people resulting from both his work and his hobby, hunting. "Fat Hearts" is a story of Asema Kehe, his hunting companion for twelve years and their many unusual experiences in the bush together. After twenty five years apart, Bergsma returns to Nigeria and finds his dying friend. In "The Salt Makers" he becomes lost on a hunt and ends up in compound where six wild looking Utur tribesmen are boiling something in a huge metal pot. Bergsma's attempt to solicit assistance by using pantomime is a hilarious spoof of cross cultural mis-understanding.
While in Yemen Arab Republic, in "Sleep Deprivation" he becomes involved with Russian spies and a noisy amorous couple in a hotel room in Sana'a. In Belize he accompanies a project student home. He stays overnight with the student in a tiny stilt house above a swamp and becomes acquainted intimately with "Sleep Apnea" when his partner dies a hundred times a night.
In Egypt, with his family, they descend ancient stone steps under a pyramid. He discovers he has a serious case of 'tombaphobia' in "Pharaoh's Tomb".
His memoirs speak of the birth and rebirth of ideas and beliefs over a lifetime; 'we are born in mystery, we live in mystery and we die in mystery'.
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