Tadpole chronicles the enigmatic life of R. Franklin Cook-author, innovator, missiologist, strategist, and thinker. Franklin spent his first 16 years in India, the son of Christian missionaries, and that experience shaped his worldview, his career, and his life. This is his story. It is also a generational story. Contributing author Jacquelyn Cork, Franklin''s daughter, writes poignantly about her own experiences in India and about traveling there with her father. She shares her own perspective, as well as those of her mother and brother who also traveled to India with Franklin. She describes how seeing her dad in the place he was raised helped her understand more about him and more about the complex , diverse, and beautiful place India is. Included are memoirs of Franklin''s formative years in colonial India, his experiences during the tumultuous period of its independence from Britain, his adjustment of returning to the United States, a place he had never considered home; and his witness of the revolutionary 1960s and the 1989 breach of the Berlin Wall that opened the Iron Curtain. Franklin''s life and career have often intersected with global events. But India always beckoned him. India, the place he spent his first 16 years, is the compass that always pointed him home.

Tadpole chronicles the enigmatic life of R. Franklin Cook-author, innovator, missiologist, strategist, and thinker. Franklin spent his first 16 years in India, the son of Christian missionaries, and that experience shaped his worldview, his career, and his life. This is his story. It is also a generational story. Contributing author Jacquelyn Cork, Franklin''s daughter, writes poignantly about her own experiences in India and about traveling there with her father. She shares her own perspective, as well as those of her mother and brother who also traveled to India with Franklin. She describes how seeing her dad in the place he was raised helped her understand more about him and more about the complex , diverse, and beautiful place India is. Included are memoirs of Franklin''s formative years in colonial India, his experiences during the tumultuous period of its independence from Britain, his adjustment of returning to the United States, a place he had never considered home; and his witness of the revolutionary 1960s and the 1989 breach of the Berlin Wall that opened the Iron Curtain. Franklin''s life and career have often intersected with global events. But India always beckoned him. India, the place he spent his first 16 years, is the compass that always pointed him home.