My name’s Andrew Mills.
I want to tell you about the two books I’ve written. Both were published when I was in my nineties: Reporting for Duty published in January 2023 and Home in India published in 2021, both by Wipf and Stock out of Eugene, Oregon.
I wrote Reporting for Duty: My Urgency for Justice and Peace from the summer of 2021 through September 2022, after the worst of the Covid Pandemic was over.
When one of my sons, Skyler, finished reading my first book Home in India, he said he had some questions for me. He wondered why I had said little or nothing about the weather in India nor the look of the countryside in the book. Then he asked when I might be writing another book. I told him that I just didn’t have another book in me. But as the weeks went by, I began to feel I wanted to write something about my adventures in activism during other parts of my life. Like when I participated in part of the civil-rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965 and when I was in a group that was kidnapped by the Contras in Costa Rica in 1985.
Reporting for Duty is a memoir in the sense that it describes many of the things I have done in my life to promote justice and peace in terms of America’s foreign and domestic policies. But it is more than a memoir, as it also includes background for, and analysis of, those peace and justice issues involved. I wrote the book to encourage others to join in the struggle for justice and peace in the situations facing them in our time.
I wrote Home in India: A Pilgrimage with People and Poverty in South India in the middle of the Covid Pandemic in 2020 and it kept me out of mischief for several months. I wanted to write down for my grandchildren and others my experiences in India during my first term 1956-61, and why I loved being there. Yes, I had a love affair with India and its people and customs, and it’s never worn off. That’s why I’ve kept going back with one or another of my children to see old friends and familiar places there, well after my family and I left there in July 1971, the end of our second and last term in India. It was such a privilege being there and feeling the excitement of experiencing a new culture and learning a wonderfully new language, Tamil. So in my ninetieth year, I decided it was high time I put all those vivid memories of decades ago on paper, or electronically transcribed. I learned so much from my experiences and from the people I met and worked with in India and I reaped rich rewards.
For more details about REPORTING FOR dUTY, CLICK HERE
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For more details about Home in India, CLICK HERE
TO purchase the book, click on this link.