Tom Mann – författare

Steve would never have guessed that his name would come up in a conversation in the Oval Office, nor was he aware the discussions involved a brutal Cold War standoff. He was rattled to the core over images of battle he witnessed in a small Spanish town but relieved to be headed home after a tumultuous semester-abroad during his senior year of high school. He decided not to tell anyone about his mishaps but still felt bothered by lingering images of dead people with bloody holes in their bodies, trucks with lifeless legs sticking out the back.

He wrote to Katarina, the Spanish girl he met and befriended, shortly after he returned to Kansas, but had a hard time finding the words through a haze of brain damage caused by Soviet poisonings. She remembered him too for his nave idealism and bravado. She couldn''t stand the idea of leaving him to face a desperate fate of political retribution, wondering if she''d ever see him again.

As a migrant to Australia from North East Scotland, Tom Mann portrays, in Launching Out from Scotland, a unique set of challenges and encounters in Australia and other countries, which include Algeria, the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, and China. The issues Tom confronts concern the cruelty and effects of war, the plight of refugees, homeless children, the growing of poppies for opium, agricultural and village development, land degradation, mental health, suicide, and miscarriages of justice. With a light-hearted approach, Tom makes each situation real to the reader with anecdotes relating to the challenges and personal encounters. Life, Tom has found, is an adventure, of learning, being open, sharing, and finding oneself in an ongoing journey that never ceases. Launching Out from Scotland shares that passion with the reader. It is an absorbing and inspirational read.