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...

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...

Three American GIs have gone missing in different South Korean cities. Sergeants George Sueno and Ernie Bascom, agents for the Army CID, link the disappearances to a woman locally rumored to be a gumiho, a legendary nine-thousand-tailed fox disguised as a woman. George suspects that the woman is no mythical creature, but a wealthy kidnapper who's good at covering her tracks. Scrambling to stay one step ahead of a psychotic mastermind, George realizes he will have to risk his life to discov...

US Army CID agents George Sueno and Ernie Bascom become entangled with a push tabloid reporter as they investigate a series of violent bank robberies throughout South Korea. South Korea, 1970s: A rash of armed robberies at local Korean banks doesn't concern the American military-until a fatality occurs, and proof surfaces that US soldiers are behind the crimes. The case has been assigned to CID Agents Jake Burrows and Felix Slabem, but they certainly won't do anything that might make 8th U...

The tenth book in the critically acclaimed Ernie Bascom and George SueNo series set in South Korea in the 1970s. South Korea, 1974: A young Korean woman is found strangled to death on the frozen banks of the Sonyu River with only a carefully calligraphed poem on her person. Sergeants George SueNo and Ernie Bascom, agents in the US 8th Army CID, are called in by the formidable KNP detective Gil Kwon-up to investigate. As they begin to investigate, George and Ernie come into direct contact w...

The Korean Demilitarized Zone, 1970s: A battered corpse is found a few feet north of the line dividing North and South Korea. When 8th Army CID Agents George Sueno and Ernie Bascom are ordered by superiors to pull the body to South Korean side, they have no idea of the international conflict the action will spark. Before war breaks out, they must discover who killed Corporal Noh Jong-bae, a young Korean civilian augmented to the US Army who had few enemies. But the murderer could be from e...

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...