In 1961, Kathleen Gamble’s mother broke her ankle jumping off the wing of a crashed and burning airplane. Her father held Kathy in his arms when he jumped, she was five years old. They were both unhurt. Her two older brothers jumped, too, and walked away. Seventeen people died in the crash. And so begins Kathleen Gamble’s delightful engrossing, courageous and painfully honest tale of growing up as a TCK (Third Culture Kid) and the fascinating life that followed.
Kathleen was born in Burma and went to elementary and high schools in Mexico, Columbia, Nigeria, Switzerland and the United States with dozens of detailed anecdotes including journal entries and excerpts from letters written with the color, words and urgency of the time describing the life of a kid forever adapting.
“Growing up I always felt like an object. In Latin America, I figured it was the culture that made the men prey on me and harass me. But when I moved to Africa, the men were the same. They were the same the world over.” There is feminist quality to the book, an insistence on her woman-ness within the routine misogyny she confronts across the world. Her feminism is not an intellectualism or a cudgel, but is rather the dispassionate recounting of the assumptions and bigotries of the cultures around her exacerbated by environment, language and the isolation of the boarding schools she attended. In high school, she was raped by a friend and classmate, an incident she describes with a candor and precision that reveals the horror of the moment.
Echoes of a Global Life is a unique and fascinating portrait of a woman striding the world to her own fife; to this day, she flies regularly and hates it.
– Stephen Banks, Author at America is a beautiful thing
“Echoes of a Global Life” is a fascinating first-person account of a unique ex-pat upbringing in a time and in a world that no longer exists. Part memoir, part travel log, part history, Kathleen Gamble shares her adventures and observations as a third culture kid, raised by parents in foreign lands, drawn to living internationally herself, and finally as mother to a son who is also a global nomad. I highly recommend “Echoes of a Global Life”.
– Professor Tina Norton Buck, Austin, Texas
By turns entertaining and disturbing, hopeful and heartbreaking, Kathleen Gamble’s story is a window into a world most people never experience—where letting go is a way of life, and roots never have time to take hold. Where resilience means reinventing oneself for each new place and time. A magnificent portrait of the timeless search for home.
– A.A.Vogel, author of Call of the Desert: Crossing (Beloved Daughter series)
Kathleen Gamble’s Echoes of a Global Life is an unflinchingly honest account of her experiences as a Third Culture Kid (TCK) or Global Nomad as those of us who have grown-up across the globe call ourselves. “Rootless” and “Restless” is how she describes herself after a life living on several continents, several of which affected her profoundly during her formative years. Despite our best intentions we never quite fit in, but we bring an extraordinary cross-cultural adaptability and resilience that benefits our communities and careers which Ms. Gamble describes eloquently.
– Diana B. Putman, Ph.D., Retired USAID Senior Foreign Service Officer
Life as a global nomad sounds enticing, unless you’re a child who has no say in it. Kathleen Gamble grew up in Burma, Latin America, Nigeria, and in boarding schools. Those experiences enriched her but left her feeling adrift. She followed her husband to Moscow in the chaotic 1990s, an adventure that ended badly. Now on her own in the U.S., she has written this book to make sense of the grief and the bond she shares with other Third Culture Kids.
– Carol Matlack, Former Foreign Correspondent, living in Paris