Book description
When he married for the second time, Jay Keyser thought he and his wife
would settle down on a bucolic little farm where the cows meet the sea.
That was before he found out the awful truth: he had married a travel
junkie. While he was envisioning walks along quiet beaches, her sights
were set on stakeouts beside Tanzani's Grumeti River watching crocodiles
take down baboons. He didn't want to come within 6,000 miles of a
crocodile, let alone 6 feet. But, somehow, he couldn't let Nancy go it
alone. And so, for the past 15 years, Jay Keyser has followed his wife
around this treacherous world. This is his chronicle. Our reluctant
traveler did his level best to understand the extraordinary people and
places he visited as well as his internal conflict. He gradually began
to accept profound differences between his wife and himself. Although
terrified by them, he has learned from his experiences, most especially
from an encounter with an angry female gorilla, who offered key insight
into marriage and human nature. Jay Keyser learned to stop and smell the
elephant dung. "An honest memoir by a reluctant traveler brings
all the advantages of learning about exotic locales without the
indignities, discomforts, and occasional terrors of actually visiting
them. Jay Keyser - wit, poet, scholar, and bon vivant - offers a
pleasurable and edifying way to see the world in the comfort of your own
home.” Samuel Jay Keyser attended George Washington, Oxford and Yale
Universities. With a PhD in linguistics from Yale, Keyser taught at
Brandeis University, University College, London, the University of
Massachusetts is currently Professor Emeritus and Special Assistant to
the Chancellor of MIT. He is author of Raising the Dead, The Pond God
and Other Stories (winner of a Lee Bennett Hopkins Honor Award), and
Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows. When he isn't traveling, Keyser
plays New Orleans, swing and avant garde jazz trombone in the Boston
area.
