Other editions of book Child in Paradise

It wasn’t until I began writing Child and dredging up long buried memories that I rediscovered just what a wonderful and extraordinary childhood I was privilege too. What started out as a short narrative quickly turned into a full-length book. Though I have gone on to do many things throughout life looking back I have to concede that being a kid ranks right at the top. Child provides the reader insight into places and times far removed from what exists today; it chronicles a young boy’s struggles and adventures as he comes of age and how he copes to reconcile living in two distinct worlds.

Child in Paradise is the story of an American boy growing up in a foreign land; it chronicles his everyday trials and triumphs as he makes the convoluted journey from childhood into adolescence. A story that takes place predominately in the tiny tropical Central American Colony of British Honduras, now Belize. It is a collection of memories as told by the old man this boy became. Biographical materials are usually written to combine the person with the significance they have with particular names, dates, places, or events, history abounds with them. For the vast majority of us who live in everyday anonymity the only important dates and places were where and when we were brought into the world and again when we leave it. Thus it is with my life, it cannot in large part be measured or pinned to any extraordinary events or dates, but rather to a series of everyday happenings some major most minor each woven and intertwined together so that over time they create the tapestry of a person's life, so it is for all of us. This is how I see mine and how I have attempted to write it. There comes a time in one's life when the daily pressures of living life ease and one finally finds time to participate in a little introspection, to look back in an attempt to determine where the forks in the road had been and the consequences of taking the ones chosen. I was able to pinpoint with some measure of certainty just how and when the views I possess of life and my surroundings were formed, thankfully most were beneficial though there were a few I found somewhat disturbing. I found as I dredged up some of my earliest memories I had a tendency to write them down as if I were still that little boy, So in essence much of what follows is seen through the eyes of that child over fifty years ago.