Author and Academic Adventurer
Goltz has been working on several new books over the past few years. All titles are provisional. These include:
THE BRIDGE, is a series of 16 long-form essays connected to his forty years of intimate association with TURKEY, ranging from initial naive contact back in the early 1980s, through the current Erdoğan government. Chapters range from an exploration of the so-called 'Crypto-Armenians' to Bulgaria's 'Name-Changing' campaign of the late 1980s, the Gezi Park riots of 2013 to the July 15 2016 abortive putsch against Recep Tayyib Erdoğan and its aftermath, along with Kurds, Kurds and Kurds. Chapters will soon be avalable to download; donations appeciated! This likely be a Kindle book.
A LOST MIDDLE EAST REMEMBERED, is a series of long-form essays drafted in the 1990s concerning mainly former Ottoman lands of the Levant with a special focus on Syria (where Goltz lived in the early 1980s before being expelled as a suspected spy, Egypt (Sufi ceremonies and Alexandria) and Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War, when Goltz served as the chief logistical agent for a US refugee agency in Iraqi Kurdistan. Essays on Kosovo circa the NATO 1999 war round out the picture, along with a long, meditative essays on the fate of the Aral Sea in (Kazakh) Central Asia. Chapters will soon be avalable to download; donations appeciated! This likely be a Kindle book.
FARGO, FAREWELL, is a complete break from Goltz's post-Soviet/Turco/Middle-Eastern interests and publications, but a series of long-form essays much closer to his roots in the High Plains of North Dakota and Montana. These include meditations on the Bakken oil-fields, the tribal protest at Standing Rock, getting zapped by the radon-mines of central Montana and other items. A few further far-flung yarns from the larger western hemisphere are likely to be included, such as trying to be 'Hemingway For A Day' in the Caribbean and hitchhiking (on a cane) for some 1,500 miles up the length of Baja, California to Tijuana. The COVID-19 virus will also be addressed here. Again, Chapters will soon be avalable to download; donations appeciated! And this likely be a Kindle book.
Copyright 2010 Thomas Goltz. All rights reserved.