Around the World in Fifty Years
by Elayne Clift
Narrative/Poetry, 304 pages
Price $21.95
ISBN 978-1-945091-98-8
Publisher: Braughler Books LLC., Springboro, Ohio
To Order: Amazon or sales@braughlerbooks.com or at 937-58 BOOKS
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Pack your luggage, purchase your plane tickets, update your passport. Prepare an itinerary for a year-long journey that will touch every country around the globe. Or, just buy a copy of Elayne Clift’s “Around the World in Fifty Years,” for $21.95. Subtitled, “Travel Tales from a Not So Innocent Abroad,” Clift’s new creation collates some fifty years of travel experiences. Using her exceptional skills in writing narrative and poetry, this volume is an anecdotal treasure of travel in a world rich in mystery and diversity.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
Elayne Clift has visited almost 100 countries on every continent for work and pleasure. Her travel memoir shares personal stories, vignettes, photographs, and postscripts that range from poignant to hilarious. There are scenes from Indian railway stations to rural Romanian villages. Along the way readers meet the people who made her travel special, ranging from a professor in Jordan to a desert driver in Dubai to an elderly artist in France. One reviewer has called the book “a treasure of armchair travel.”
Every time Elayne travels I eagerly await her dispatches. I feel like I am right there with her, meeting interesting people, having life-altering experiences, soaking in new cultures, exploring unimaginable landscapes. For those not able to travel far and wide, this book is a joyful ride. For inveterate travelers, it’s a wonderfully shared gift.
— M. Eileen Higgins, DM, Former senior managing editor, Aspen Publishers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Elayne Clift, M.A., a Vermont Humanities Council Scholar, is an award-winning writer
and journalist, a writing workshop leader, and a lecturer. Her work has been widely
anthologized and appears in numerous publications internationally. A regular columnist
for the Keene (NH) Sentinel and the Brattleboro (VT)
Commons, and a reviewer for the New York Journal of Books, she has written
for various magazines and periodicals. Her Novel, Hester’s Daughters,a
contemporary, feminist retelling of The Scarlet Letter, appeared in 2012 and her
award-winning short story collection, Children of the Chalet, was published by
Braughler Books (2015).
FROM THE BOOK:
I Listen and My Heart is Breaking
by Elayne Clift
I listen to the women of Rio,
When they speak of street children murdered,
And my heart is breaking.
I listen to the women of Chernobyl,
Tell of childish faces grown old and lifeless,
And my heart is breaking.
I listen to the women of Bophal,
Whisper the grotesqueness of deformity and disease,
And my heart is breaking.
I listen to the women on the Solomons,
Giving testimony to jellyfish babies born without limbs,
And my heart is breaking.
I listen to the women of Manila,
Mourning the prostitution of their daughters,
And my heart is breaking.
I listen to the women of Addis Ababa,
Describing empty stomachs and drought,
And my heart is breaking.
I listen to the women of Cyprus,
And Ireland and Sri Lanka and South Africa,
I hear conflict’s pain, and my heart is breaking.
But also,
I listen to the Madres, and Women in Black,
And African mamas. I listen to young women
Of Asia, and the Pacific Rim. I listen
To the female voice of North Africa,
And the Middle East and Eastern Europe,
And I hear the power of Everywoman, Everywhere.
Then, I rejoice. I hope. I take heart.
Editor’s note: After attending the 1985 UN Decade for Women conference in Nairobi,
Kenya, Clift’s poem was put to music by the African-American acapella group, Sweet
Honey in the Rock. |
