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Hidden
Immigrants: Legacies of Growing Up Abroad
by Linda Bell.
Bell, a journalist and spouse of a career foreign service
officer, brought up their two daughters in seven countries
and one large Pacific island, and started becoming interested
in Third Country Kids after observing the effects of overseas
life on her own children.
This book is for, by and about the children of overseas
Americans. The thirteen voices heard in this book are both
passionate and candid. They talk both for themselves and
a wider audience about what it was like for them as they
found their own place in their home country after years
of being formed outside. For example, as one woman quoted
in the chapter titled "What Stuck—Evaluations and Wishes"
emotionally explained; "I can hardly talk about what
is happening in Yugoslavia at the moment. I was a child
there. Part of the problem of growing up this way is that
it is very hard to go back and test your childhood impressions
against the realities of the day. You lose your childhood
when you grow up. Normally you could go back and check for
yourself. Now I am watching this place where I grew up destroyed
and I literally can't stand to watch it. It's not as if
I have any great attachment to the place now—I only spent
three and some years there, important years—but I was a
child there. I feel as though I have to work hard to keep
all these various influences in my life integrated, to adjust,
but not to completely lose the childhood experiences either.
To see the place physically destroyed seems symbolic."--Reviewed
by Francesca Kelly for The SUN
© 1998 ISBN: 0-9401213-5-2 $19.95
Cross Cultural Publications, Inc. P.O. Box 506, Notre Dame,
IN 46556
Tel: 1-800-561-6526.
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Books reviewed by Tales from a Small Planet
Notes from a Traveling
Childhood edited by Karen Curnow McCluskey
Parenting Abroad,
by Ngaire Jehle-Caitcheon
The Third Culture
Kid Experience; Growing Up Between Two Worlds by David
Pollock and Ruth Van Reken
Unrooted Childhoods:
Memoirs of Growing Up Global by Faith Eidse and Nina
Sichel (editors) (reviewed June 2004)
Welcome Home, Who Are
You? by Gene and Kathryn Schmiel
Military
Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress
by Mary Edwards Wertsch
© 1996 ISBN: 0-9639260-3-9 $14.95
Aletheia Publications, Inc. 46 Bell Hollow Rd. Putnam Valley,
NY 10579 Tel. (914) 526-2873.
E-mail: mailto:AlethPub@aol.com
Website: http://members.aol.com/AlethPub
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Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the
Fortress
The
Third Culture Kid Experience: Growing Up Among Worlds
br David C. Pollock, Ruth E. Van Reken
Read
the Tales from a Small Planet Review
© 1999 ISBN: 1877864722 $19.95
International Press
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Notes
from a Traveling Childhood: Readings for Internationally
Mobile Parents & Children
Karen C. McCluskey (Editor)
They say you can't tell a book by its cover and I would
add, "You can't always tell a book by its title."
This battle-weary FS spouse and parent of two of those "internationally
mobile" children assumed that this book was merely
one more collection of musings by former expatriate children.
I didn't think it could tell me much. But I was wrong. --
Reviewed
by Michael Ann Dean
© 1994 ISBN: 0965853810 $5.95
Foreign Service Youth Foundation
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Of
Many Lands: Journal of a Traveling Childhood
by Sara Mansfield Taber
Of Many Lands is a journal for people who have grown up
(or are still growing up) in foreign countries. Ms. Taber
interweaves her own childhood memories with thoughtful questions
for the reader to answer for his- or herself. She has found
that keeping a journal helped pull together the many pieces
of her childhood experiences, and even the many pieces of
herself, for moving from country to country as a child does
strange things to a person. She encourages her readers to
write about their own experiences right in the book (there
are spaces there for them to do so). It's an unusual and
inspiring treatment of the Foreign Service childhood, and
Ms. Taber's reflections are excellent springboards for reflection
and soul-searching:
"It is strange. The things I love about my country
are the very things I hate. I love the rawness of the American
spirit and I hate its crudeness. I love American boldness
and I despise its brashness. I love Twinkies and Ripples
chips and Oreos—they reflect a special brand of American
brilliance—and I also hate their aftertaste. I love the
American passion for independence and yet I hate the way
it dissolves to selfishness...I love the egalitarianism,
the true story that in American you can rise from rags to
riches, that you can be born poor and gain respect. Most
of all, I love the sense of possibility that suffuses the
air of my country. In American, you can ride over the horizon."--Reviewed
by Francesca Kelly for The SUN
© 1997 ISBN: 0965853802 $10.50
Foreign Service Youth Foundation, P.O. Box 39185, Washington,
DC 20016
E-mail: mailto:scottsk@erols.com
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