Have you ever read a memoir written by a 10-year-old? Half A World Away fuses Jonathan A. Wright's childhood journals with deep memory to reimagine visits to more than 50 locations across the globe more than half a century ago.
Young "Jonny" comes of age during the trip. He is profoundly moved by seeing the beauty and riches of the ancient world. But he struggles with the knowledge that many of places he visits were built on the backs of the poor and enslaved. His eyes are open to modern-day injustices as well, and he is deeply affected.
Half A World Away revisits the nine-month trip Wright, now in his 70s, and his family took in 1962 and 1963-a time of great hope for America and the world. His surviving journal sparked fresh details and observations from deep memory to make vivid and compelling stories. Each is written with what Jonny knew at his age, at that time.
Jonny travels with journal in hand and the family camera slung over his shoulder. With him are his brother Duncan; chaperone Christopher Lydon (the noted journalist, television host, and commentator); and his parents, historians Arthur and Mary Wright, during their year-long sabbatical from Yale.
Over the course of a school year, the family visits England, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The itinerary is organized around the senior Wrights' scholarly interests, with visits to historically important sites across centuries and cultures. Everywhere they go, the smells, sights, food, and history come alive in Jonny's writing, photographs, and postcards.
The 10-year-old writes with awe about the still-fresh ruins of London from the Blitz, the Queen on her way to open Parliament in the tenth year of her reign, and a black man lying injured and unaided in the street.
They visit Constantine's underground cisterns in Istanbul, peer down 6,000 years into a hole in Byblos, stare across the Israeli-Lebanese frontier in the shadow of a Crusader Castle, and see the Beirut refugee camps, enlarging Jonny's understanding of his world.
India, with its street vendors, cave temples, architecture, levitation, and snake charming, offers both a new and ancient world. A dawn boat ride witnessing cremation on the Ganges, the coal-smoke-dimmed late afternoon of Calcutta, and boys racing after a discarded banana peel leave the writer changed.
Ten days in the Himalayas are humbling as Jonny visits mountain huts, hidden temples, and back streets filled with artisans from earlier times. Motorized rickshaws and elephants take them deep into the jungle!
Jonny captures Hong Kong's energy, industry, and artisanry, including a junk ride, before the travelers continue to Taipei and on to Japan for the final weeks of their trip.
Half A World Away offers an intimate window into an earlier time through the eyes of a child whose values were shaped by the experience.
Wright hopes his narrative will encourage young readers to tell their own stories and encourage parents and grandparents to take their families to new places and experience new things, and to imagine the best for others.
"A world of possibility," he says, "while often now cast in long shadows, remains a promise for humankind."
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