On the Edge

»I believe that a full life demands passionate involvement and that often means taking risks. The key thing isn’t the risks you take, but what you take them for.«

John Graham

John Graham shipped out on a freighter when he was sixteen, took part in the first ascent of Mt. McKinley’s North Wall at twenty, and hitchhiked around the world at twenty-two.

A graduate of both Harvard and Stanford, and a Foreign Service Officer for fifteen years, he was in the middle of the revolution in Libya and the war in Vietnam. For three years in the mid-seventies, he was a member of NATO’s top-secret Nuclear Planning Group, then served as a foreign policy advisor to Senator John Glenn (Ohia). At the United Nations, he was deeply involved in U.S. initiatives in Southern Africa, South Asia and Cuba, always trying to bring a peace-building aspect into the dossiers – even against the interests of his own government.

By most measures, he was very successful. But something was missing. In 1980, a close brush with death aboard a burning cruise ship in the North Pacifc forced him to accept a deeper meaning for his life. Now out of the Foreign Service, he began teaching better ways of handling challenge and conflict.

The autobiographical novel »On the Edge« traces the adventurous search for external and internal borderline experiences against the background of the great political upheavals of the second half of the 20th century up to our days. This search finally leads to the transgression of one of the most decisive and most existential limitations: the overcoming of one's own deceptive self-perception in favor of a widening of the view of reality and the concerns of the other.

Preis: 24.90 € / 29.90 CHF