Tales This Side of the Elysian Fields

"Travel takes you to places in yourself you might not otherwise visit . . ."In this delightful and intriguing collection of essays, Trevor W. Harrison, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge and a well-known contributor to public media, tells sometimes light-hearted and sometimes poignant tales of his life between his late teens and early thirties, a time when, like many other young people of the era, he travelled the world, beginning with hitchhiking or driving across western Canada and the United States in the early 1970s and travelling to Europe and Asia in the mid970s and early 1980s.

From working on the railway in a small town to playing a Hittite soldier in a Biblical movie, from life among the hippies on a famous Greek beach to life in a houseboat on India's Lake Dal, from bullfights in Barcelona to the towering Himalayas, Harrison invites readers to travel with him, to meet the people, see the places, and experience the events he encountered as a young man.

The stories we tell of our lives, Harrison says, are "the offspring of a pleasurable intercourse between fiction and non-fiction, gestated over time." There is nothing more innately human than the telling of tales. Enjoy these while you, too, are still this side of the Elysian Fields.