Pioneering Over Four Epochs Summary:

An abridged version of this 2600 page book in five volumes is now available at eBookMall in one downloading. The author, whose details you can read below, and a summary of whose book we have included as a taster right here on this page, took 23 years to write this marathon exercise. It is as much a study in autobiography as it is his own autobiography. The book, more a memoir in many ways, draws extensively from the social sciences and the humanities with over 2000 references & quotations and you can dip into it anywhere and enjoy a read. For $2.98 it's a give away!

SUMMARY AND OVERVIEW OF VOLUMES ONE TO FIVE

Anyone wanting to get a bird's-eye view of the 2600 pages in this book need only go to volume 1, which is essentially a life-overview; volume 2 is a discussion of my pre-pioneering days during the Ten Year Crusade: 1953-1963; volume 3 examines homefront pioneering: 1962-1971 and volume 4: international pioneering: 1971 to 2007; finally, volume 5 is a pot-pourri of essays, poems and themes developed at more length. The 30 headings at the outset of the chapters give anyone with little time a quick picture of the contents of this autobiographical study. Volume 1 contains essays on pioneering, some special poetry and a detailed resume and bio-data. A million words is a big-read and I encourage readers, therefore, to dip in at any place. There is no need to begin at the beginning. The author wishes those who do come upon this lengthy piece of writing much pleasure, much insight and a feeling that time spent reading this is time well-spent. This work can not be adequately understood as merely the story of my life. Were this just my story I'm not sure I ever would have written it in the first place, however personally meaningful the exercise has been to me. A play in four acts, innumerable scenes and more lines than I care to count is found here, from childhood to old age. But it is a play that I like to think is Everyman's, at least in many of its essentials. But, in the end, of course, we are all unique.

This work is, like William Wordsworth's great poem The Prelude, the account of the growth of a poetic personality and an imagination. It is also an account of another prelude, a prelude within the context of the Bahai Faith. And finally, after several thousand years of the recording of memory in the western intellectual tradition, a balance between personal memory and collective memory on the other is being achieved in modern history. These two major nodes of memorialization have taken place since the Homeric Period in the middle of another Formative Age This is yet one more effort in the contribution to the achievement of such a balance.

The full text of this work is still under review by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Australia, Inc. and so it is that only an abridged version of my memoirs is found here. Much of the text in smaller, shorter sections, is also found at a great many places on the internet. No review is required by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Australia Inc when only portions of a writer's text are placed on the internet. The largest single portion of my text is found here at eBookMall.