Carried on Great Winds, by John Broomfield

“Within weeks, assassins’ bullets would rip the fabric of American political life, and, before the decade was out, race riots would reduce whole blocks of nearby Detroit and other cities to smoldering ashes. On a June evening in 1969, I would join other faculty on an armistice line separating protestors and rifle-bearing State troopers.”

A young New Zealander arrives in 1963 to teach at the University of Michigan and is caught up in the radical movements of the era. John Broomfield’s memoir captures the excitements and hazards of the times — in India as well as the US. An historian of Bengal, he studies in Calcutta during both Indo-Pakistan wars of the sixties and seventies and witnesses the bloody creation of Bangladesh. Ever adventurous, he later treks in Nepal, lives for six months in a Himalayan village and trades job security in Michigan for a more challenging but tenuous position in San Francisco.

With keen observation and lively writing, Carried on Great Winds by John Broomfield takes us as companions on a journey around the world through four turbulent decades.