Butterfly Mind

By Patrick Brown format: hardcover publication: August 2008 ISBN: 9780887842146

Price $29.95 Quantity This item is in stock and usually ships within 24 hours.

In this fascinating, revelatory, and politically astute memoir, award-winning journalist Patrick Brown weaves together three stories: the first is Brown's own education as a journalist over the past twenty-five years, and his parallel struggle with alcoholism. The second is the major political events of the past quarter century that Brown witnessed and covered -- including the shipyard in Gdansk, Poland, where Lech Walesa spoke and the Solidarity movement began; Cambodia, where Brown reported on the impact of the Paris Peace Treaty; the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolution in Czechoslovakia; and the wars in Afghanistan in 1992 and 2002. The third story is about China, which Brown first visited in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square protests and now calls home. The book ends, fittingly, in Beijing on the eve of the 2008 Olympics. By comparing and contrasting his experiences as a foreign correspondent in societies in flux, Brown beautifully reveals how life in China today is both unique and surprisingly familiar, and how a so-called "butterfly mind" -- the ability to flit from one subject to the next with great flexibility and facility -- has allowed him to thrive in the middle of it.

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