A lifelong soccer player and award-winning author shows us how the sport transcends races, ethnicities, cultures, and experiences and brings us all closer together.Tim Bascom spent half his childhood in Kansas and the other half in East Africa. Living and traveling around the world, the game of soccer proved a constant truth. Through storytelling that effortlessly flows between poignant and funny, sobering and charming, Bascom explores why soccer matters so much in...

"Moves beyond a compelling personal story to shed radiant light on history itself . . . an essential chronicle of midcentury American idealism." —Patricia Hampl, author of The Art of the Wasted DayIn 1964, at the age of three, Tim Bascom is thrust into a world of eucalyptus trees and stampeding baboons when his family moves from the Midwest to Ethiopia. The unflinchingly observant narrator of this memoir reveals his missionary parents' struggles in a somet...

When Doc Bascom tries to show his grade school sons how to climb a huge sycamore, he ends up dropping 12 feet flat-out on his back. Stunned, he finally gasps, "So that's how it's done." And in that moment, he becomes an emblem for all fathers—trying to lead the way, failing, then getting up and trying again.This "climbing lesson" is just one of 40 playful, sometimes poignant stories by award-winning author Tim Bascom, who illustrates the special bond between fathers and sons—and how that r...

A lifelong soccer player and award-winning author shows us how the sport transcends races, ethnicities, cultures, and experiences and brings us all closer together.Tim Bascom spent half his childhood in Kansas and the other half in East Africa. Living and traveling around the world, the game of soccer proved a constant truth. Through storytelling that effortlessly flows between poignant and funny, sobering and charming, Bascom explores why soccer matters so much in...