Book Description

Born in Hungary, author Gabor Bethlenfalvay spent his early childhood under privileged circumstances that he remembers as his Garden of Eden. It was a paradise until the end of World War II. He tells of the events of joy and of tragedy in his life before and after the war in his Xlibris publication: In Search of an America: An Introvert on the Road. In this tale of the road' the author relives how he and his family fled west, just before the Red Army overran his hometown, to end up in a small village in Bavaria. There, six years of exile were spent absorbing a classical education amid the rubble of post-war Germany, until emigration to the United States became possible. Assembly lines in Chicago and in Omaha were the author's first introduction to the New World, until he found his path to Military Service. He became a paratrooper and an officer but decided to return to school to study physics. In spite of an advanced degree, doubts about his vocation pulled him back into the Army. The war in Vietnam finally impelled him to resign his commission for good and to strike out for California with his young family to study biology, a decision that led to a doctorate and a research career exploring the web of life in the soil. The repeated back-and-forth between academia and the military and between Europe and the USA helps him explore and compare religious, political, sociological and scientific attitudes and patterns of thinking in the Old and New Worlds. He learns to view his new home with critical detachment. A candid look into a colorful life journey during one of history's most tumultuous times, In Search of an America: An Introvert on the Road chronicles how one man finally realized that the long road that led him to the fog-shrouded mountain outside his study window in San Luis Obispo was all part of his search for his personal utopia, 'an america,' that of his childhood dreams.