About My Book "No Stranger"

About the book, No Stranger To Strange Lands: A Journey Through Strange Coincidences, Connective Thoughts, And Far Flung Places:

- Review by author, Walt Long
- Blurb
- Table of contents from the book (for details, see Chapter Outline)
- Bibliography of works cited and reference material from the book
- Links to where you can find excerpts from the book

Click HERE for purchasing options

Review by author,  Walt Long (5 stars)

Julie has produced a delightful - if sometimes whimsical, often disparaging, and always controversial - journey through time and space. For anyone who ever believed that maybe he (or she) was different, that maybe he (or she) had the power to see deeper and clearer, to believe that ideas and remedies exist in some shrouded universe if only we could understand them - this charming and insightful adventure is certain to create a bond. This is not a prototypical travelogue or a tiresome lecture, but a genuinely bright and light-hearted look at time, space, and the over-lapping of ideas. Julie as at once a guide, a historian, a philosopher, and a companion. Whether contemplating the ages-old Indian ruins of Colorado, or the timeless beaches and canyons of the south Pacific, she is able to switch gears easily and connect the eternal dots. Never are you stranded without food for thought. It's a rare commentator who can present her ideas not as opinion, but as part of the universal consciousness.

Blurb

What do Naomi Klein, Switzerland, and the Beatles have in common? Where do Jack Kerouac, Homer, and the Australian Aborigines walk the same path? What links Kurt Vonnegut, Alice in Wonderland, and Synchronicity? Promoting Democracy and Freedom; narratives as spiritual mappings; strange coincidences – these are a few of the themes touched upon in this combination of travelogue with thought journal that amounts to one woman’s attempt to achieve a General Theory of Everything through literary non-fiction.

Whether you enjoy exploring the world in places ranging from Zürich to Moab and from tropical Polynesian islands to the farthest corners of Australia; or you prefer wanderings of the mind, from investigating what ideas themselves might be to what secrets might be revealed by archeology and from deconstructing Free-Market Ideology to reinventing Spirituality; this multi-layered journey seeks connections between every aspect of the cosmos, from the musical sphere to the stratosphere and beyond.

As I move about, from place to place and thought to thought, I explore the boundaries of my sense of anger, my sense of humor, my sense of balance, and my sense of sanity while trying to make sense out of my experience of the world. In a little apartment in Florida, I sense strange forces at work in the universe. In the stony desert Southwest, I feel as if I am on an island in the middle of the ocean. On a verdant island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, I am reminded of the smoldering volcanoes of the Aztec Empire. At a sacred midden site on the lonely coast of Tasmania, I look over waters that reach all the way across the globe to the shores of Patagonia. On an old farm in wintry West Virginia, I look inward to discover what it means to be “human.” And on a four-day odyssey across the continent of Australia by train, I muse:

Maybe a confused soul, disoriented, questioning what is real and what we think is real, looking at things from strange perspectives, looking at the moon from upside down; who found that it was possible for Space and Time to fluctuate; who thinks that she is connected to a Thought-o-Sphere, that her thoughts are directly affected by ideas floating around in this Thought-o-Sphere, and that these thoughts and ideas along with memories and feelings might exist in a more than ethereal way in tiny twisted other dimensions that our brains are able to access; maybe a person like that could have just the right combination of experiences so that she discovers the Possibility of some Brave New World of Ideas, and then expresses them out to the Thought-o-Sphere, so that they may percolate and resonate and synthesize and crystallize and turn into something interesting and important... Sigh, a girl can dream.

Table Of Contents

Prologue: It’s About Time
Dedication And Apology
Introduction

Part I: Movements About The Northern Hemisphere
Chapter 1: Strange Coincidences
Chapter 2: Synchronicity
Chapter 3: Switzerland
- The Shock Doctrine
- Well Excuse Me, Milton Friedman
Chapter 4: On The Road
- Nouveau-Nomadism
Chapter 5: Oklahoma
- On Sadness
- Tragedy And Irony
Chapter 6: Texas
- Who Is Howard Zinn?
Chapter 7: New Mexico
- Power Requires Wisdom
Chapter 8: Colorado
- Chief Ouray
Chapter 9: Utah
- Studs Speaks
Chapter 10: Heading Back East
- Militias To Mercenaries
- Accountability
Chapter 11: String Theory
- Possibilities
Chapter 12: Heading North To Go South

Part II: Movements About French Polynesia
Chapter 13: Tahiti
- Romancing Romanticism
- The Man On The Tram: A Short Story
Chapter 14: Moorea
- Change?
Chapter 15: Huahine
- Here And There

Part III: Movements About Australia
Chapter 16: Learning Aussie Speak
- Cuckoo Clocks, Condottieri, And Character
Chapter 17: In Darwin’s Footsteps
Chapter 18: Cultured In Sydney
Chapter 19: On The Train
- Space-Time
Chapter 20: The Oz Of Oz
Chapter 21: Southwest Corner
Chapter 22: Dream Time
- Origins Of Ideas
Chapter 23: New Year
- From Ferlinghetti To The Beat-les
Chapter 24: Across The Continent
Chapter 25: About Tasmania
- Emergent Patterns
Chapter 26: Southeast Corner
- Creative Spiritualism
Chapter 27: Back To Sydney
- Skeletons And Calendars
- Making Things Right
Chapter 28: The Longest Day
- The Power Of Music

Part IV: Back In North America
Chapter 29: West Virginia Dreamin’
- Rethinking Thinking
Chapter 30: Human-Nature
- Someone Who Cares
Chapter 31: Waves
- Duct Tape Dick
- Waves
Chapter 32: White Lines On The Freeway
- Consequences And Truth
Chapter 33: Synchronicity II
- Message In A Bottle
Chapter 34: Confluence
- Hadrons On My Mind
Chapter 35: …And Now, Back To You, Kurt
- To Kurt Vonnegut

Epilogue
- It’s About Place
- George Carlin


Bibliography

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Goodman, Amy. “Legendary Radio Broadcaster and Oral Historian Studs Terkel on the Iraq War, NSA Domestic Spy Program, Mahalia Jackson, James Baldwin, the Labor Movement and His New Memoir Touch and Go.” Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report. Link TV. 13 Nov, 2007.

Goodman, Amy. “The Shock Doctrine: Naomi Klein on the Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report. Link TV. 17 Sept, 2007.

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Reference Material:

All About Switzerland –from A to Z. Lucerne: ed. Markus G. Jud. http://www.all-about-switzerland.info/.

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Further Reading:

“Abramoff Scandal Updates.” Wendy L. Doromal. Unheard No More! This is a forum for social justice dedicated to human rights, freedom, justice, and democracy for the foreign contract workers in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. http://unheardnomore.blogspot.com/2010/02/abramoff-scandal-updates.html.

“Craig Ferguson Skips Late Night Wars For Haiti, Slams “Dumb, Mean” Rush Limbaugh.” writ. Rachel Sklar. Mediate. 15 Jan 2010. http://www.mediaite.com/tv/craig-ferguson-skips-late-night-wars-for-haiti-slams-dumb-mean-rush-limbaugh/.

“Drugs, Music, and Necessary Obscenities.” writ. Julie R Butler. we fear what we don’t understand 27 Sept 2008. http://julierbutler.blogspot.com/2008/09/drugs-music-and-necessary-obsenities.html.

“How Medical Marijuana Works.” writ. Jacob Silverman. Discovery Health http://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/drugs-alcohol/medical-marijuana.htm/printable.

“My fellow Americans: Craig Ferguson tells viewers, "If you don't vote you're a moron"; read his monologue.” kansascity.com 10 Sept 2008. http://blogs.kansascity.com/tvbarn/2008/09/my-fellow-ameri.html.

“Republican IT consultant subpoenaed in case alleging tampering with 2004 election.” writ. Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane The Raw Story 29 Sept 2008. http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Republican_IT_consultant_subpoenaed_in_case_0929.html.

“’79 Revolution: Technology War.” posted by user “SAVAK_1.” Iranian.com 2 Feb 2010 http://www.iranian.com/main/albums/paris-punch.

Where You Can Find Excerpts from the Book

Postings that appear here at Connectively Speaking:

On Lies That Divide Us

Spiritual Vibrations

Ann Woolner on the Indecency of the Culture War

Opposite Directions

F*** The Rules

Postings at my blog, we fear what we don't understand:

Prologue: It's About Time

Dedication And Apology

Three essays from No Stranger To Strange Lands in which the topic ineluctably turns into an Ayn Rant

Studs Terkel excerpt from No Stranger

Smashwords - No Stranger To Strange Lands - Here, you can read the first 15% of the book in any of the formats that it is available as, including on Kindle, as a PDF, or online

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