Because the World is Round

by Jane Saginaw

Overview

A story of global travel, personal growth, and family responsibility through the lens of teenage girl in 1969.

Fifteen-year-old Jane was trapped. Trapped in high school in Dallas, Texas where her classes were too easy and her classmates were too conventional. Trapped in service to her mother, a polio survivor who used a wheelchair.

When her parents sold their automobile brake-repair business in 1969, they withdrew Jane from her high school to travel the world, visiting India, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, Yugoslavia and Northern Europe. As she traveled, Jane was pushed to reconcile her dual role as responsible daughter and as teen in the late sixties, the era of Bobby Fischer, The Beatles, and Hair. Because the World is Round reckons with what it means to be an individual, a caretaker, and a traveler in a vast and changing world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646052066
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	11/29/2022
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jane Saginaw is a student in the Ph.D. Program in Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, where her interests include American domestic life during the Second World War. Before returning to graduate school, Jane was a trial lawyer in Dallas and served in the Clinton Administration as the Regional Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region Six.

Table of Contents

Preface 9

1 Dallas, Texas 13

2 Dallas, Texas 19

3 Dallas, Texas 29

4 Lisbon, Portugal 40

5 En Route to New Delhi, India 47

6 New Delhi, India 65

7 Kabul, Afghanistan 89

8 Tehran, Iran 107

9 Tel Aviv, Israel 130

10 Istanbul, Turkey 156

11 Aboard The Apollo, Greece 168

12 Belgrade, Yugoslavia 179

13 London, England 207

14 Dallas, Texas 221

Editorial Reviews

Jane Saginaw’s Because the World Is Round is a moving, hilarious, and beautifully written memoir of the author’s teenage adventure with her family, which takes her to some of the most fascinating places on earth—Lisbon, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, Yugoslavia, London—in the year 1970, a time of great political and social upheaval. Along the way, the young protagonist meets Golda Meir, smokes hash for the first time in Kabul, escapes a harrowing encounter with angry villagers in the Indian countryside, and has a coming-of-age epiphany at the London production of Hair.  Even more than an adventure tale, though, Because the World Is Round is the story of the relationship between a brilliant, dominant mother who is physically disabled and her caretaker daughter, and the way that relationship changes and grows—sometimes painfully, sometimes joyously—as the daughter begins waking up to the world and a sense of her own identity, femininity, and power. With empathy and wit, in sharply observed prose, Saginaw gives insight into families, mothers, and daughters that is both deeply particular to her life and imbued with universal truths. Because the World Is Round is a book full of wisdom and delight.” —Peter Kline, author of Mirrorforms and Deviants

From the Publisher