Selected Memories: A Collection of Tales & Adventures From Travels Around the World

This book contains twenty-two independent chapters relating stories of the author's adventures over more than fifty years of global travel.

Two perspectives are found in the book. One is that of the author's personal adventures, with examples such as almost getting stuck in Iran with an expired visa, taking a nap with giraffes and zebras in South Africa, and a story of what can happen when getting a haircut where English is not spoken. He also relates his experiences of being a jury foreman in a murder trial, purchasing a goat in northern Kenya, and having a one-month-old baby teach him an important fact of life during a medical school teaching session.

The other perspective is that of the author's interactions with locals in places like Cambodia, India, Bhutan and Syria, where he developed relationships of trust and acceptance with locals he met. In one chapter, he visits a northern India Hindu monkey temple with a devout follower whose unique temple offering would shock most Westerners. In another, he shares a Cambodian bird-watching guide's narrative of avoiding certain death from the Khmer Rouge by hiding in the forest for over a year. Then there's the drama of the Bhutanese peasant farmer who was mauled by a bear in the remote part of the country, and his lengthy and exhausting efforts to obtain assistance. The author interviewed him in the Thimphu Bhutan National Hospital.

Color photographs throughout the book provide added value to the reader. Favorites vary, but dramatic candidates include the body-pierced Hindu man at the Batu Caves in Malaysia, or the Aleppo alleyway scene with the boy defying gravity with his cart. The one with the author somehow smiling with a snake draped around his neck is begging for humorous captions.