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In 1944, a patriotic young man of twenty years old joins the Army’s Tenth Mountain Division as a Second Lieutenant and is wounded leading his platoon against the Germans in Italy. Left alone on the battle field, in and out of consciousness, he fights back hopelessness and despair by vowing to stay alive. Battling through great adversity and physical pain during two years of recuperation in Army hospitals and learning to live with a permanent injury, he began a life long dream of becoming an archaeologist.
FRED WENDORF, Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory Emeritus, Southern Methodist University, went on to receive his MA and PhD from Harvard, and spent more than sixty years as a field archaeologist in the US and Africa. His collection of artifacts and antiquities is permanently housed as the Wendorf Collection at the British Museum, London. In 1987, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and is a dominant figure in American and North African archaeology.
In this engaging narrative, readers join Wendorf on his often hair-raising journey of professional and personal discoveries, achievements, successes, joys, milestones, and disappointments. With honesty, humor, humility, and even self-criticism, the author chronicles his professional and personal lives in an inspiring story that will intrigue not only fellow archaeologists, but laymen as well.
"Celebrated by his colleagues in the Americas, Europe, and Africa as a brilliant innovator who made significant advances in archaeological method and theory, Fred Wendorf has been a dominant figure in American and North African archaeology in an extremely productive career spanning nearly six decades. His engaging autobiography chronicles his personal and professional lives—warts and all."—Don D. Fowler, Mamie Kleberg Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, University of Nevada-Reno.
"Fred Wendorf is an archaeological Midas. He and his collaborators have written the prehistory for vast swaths of the Sahara, work that involves adventure, decades-long persistence, and the ability to piece together seemingly irreconcilable small pieces of a very large jigsaw puzzle."—John Yellen, president of the Paleoanthropology Society and for many years an excavator in Kenya, Ethiopia, and the Congo.
"Wendorf's rousing good story of archaeological adventures in harsh desert environments demonstrates that real archaeological adventures are only made possible by good planning, sound organization, scientific discipline, and hard work."—Raymond H. Thompson, Riecker Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, University of Arizona, and Director Emeritus, Arizona State Museum.
Copies are available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders.
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ggoodwin[.]smu.edu 
