Product Description

This book details Harris’s travels throughout the globe among common people through sixty-seven countries over twelve years. She stayed in a harem, wore a burqa, and slept on a sidewalk through the biggest battle in the Algerian War! Questions evoke critical reading and philosophical thought, and the book includes a bibliography of suggestions for further reading. Lived Values, Valued Lives (LVVL) is a series of explorations, representing real and fictionalized biographies, autobiographies, and significant fragments of lives, concerning how a person's values help inform a person's life, how that life expresses those values, and the principled ways in which intelligent individuals deal with life’s vagaries. Each volume contains discussion questions and a bibliography of readings that make LVVL appropriate for courses exploring values clarification, career exploration, or contemporary cultural issues.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2446536 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 151 pages

From the Publisher
Lived Values, Valued Lives (LVVL) is a series of explorations, representing real and fictionalized biographies, autobiographies, and significant fragments of lives, concerning how a person's values help inform a person's life, how that life expresses those values, and the principled ways in which intelligent individuals deal with life’s vagaries.

About the Author
Dixie Lee Harris was born in Arkansas and spent her early years on a cotton farm during the Great Depression in the United States. She attended public schools, then took the BS in chemistry from Arkansas State College (now Arkansas State University), Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1946. Her first job was as an industrial chemist in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She then took a job as a chemist in Beacon, New York. Dissatisfied with a career as a chemist, Harris took the MA in education from Columbia University Teacher’s College, New York, New York, in 1955. Between 1955 and 1967, she traveled the world, visiting approximately sixtyseven different countries. During 1957–1960, she taught school in Alaska, during which time she was able to combine her avocation to teach with her urge to experience geographic "ultimates," such as hiking at the Arctic Circle and the northernmost point of the United States. In 1970, Harris took the PhD from Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, upon presentation of a dissertation titled "Certain Aspects of Native Education in the Americas in the 1960s." After completing her doctoral work, she worked as a teacher in the New York State prison system at the Beacon Correctional Facility in Beacon, New York. During the last ten years of her working career, Harris was elected as a union representative and then elected to the Executive Board of the Public Employees Federation of New York State. Harris is the author of Twenty Stories of Bible Women (Hauppauge, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1980). Throughout her life, she has been interested in civil liberties, peace, labor issues, and feminism. She has been an avid enthusiast of camping, hiking, and writing. She continued to attend college courses of interest and to take brief study trips around the world until 2005. She characterizes her life as lived "during war, prosperity, exuberant living, and occasional crises."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
EXCERPT (from chapter three: War!)

Shortly I woke with a feeling of sudden alarm and terror. Two soldiers were poking through my sleeping bag with rifles! Perhaps if I kept still they would go away, I thought, or so I hoped. What else could I do against soldiers with rifles? I could not understand what they were saying at all but thought that one was French and the other Algerian, evidently some effort at bipartisan patrolling on these very few days last before Algerian independence when the French would turn over all such matters to the Algerians. Apparently they did not decide that I was harmless. They did not just go away. I guessed that my sleeping bag caught their attention since locals would only wrap some sort of shawl around them. As natural in the throes of anxiety, my imagination pictured me pulled out, robbed, raped, and shot in the streets of Oran. Even now, I cannot fathom why I felt more terrified in the presence of soldiers than with civilian men. It did not occur to me then, but now as I recount the tale I think that they could have been brigands, not soldiers, out for anything they could get. Rifles were common among the guerillas as well as among soldiers. The pairing of Algerian and French is, I think, what made me conclude that these two were soldiers. The French, I knew, had more Algerians in their forces than French, as British in India had more Indians than Brits, and similarly in other places in the dominion if my recollection is accurate. At any rate, my keeping-still strategy was not working, so I decided on another measure. Maybe if I screamed out in English, they might recognize me as English or American and believe molesting a Brit or American would be worse than accosting one of their citizens because they might incur terrible consequences. I screamed out as loud as I could in English, "Get away and leave me alone!" Their reply I understood perfectly: One of them––I could not tell whether the French or Algerian—gasped, "My God, a German woman!" and they ran. Thank goodness! Who would have thought German women to be so tough that they cow French and Algerian soldiers! I have wondered ever since just how either came to that impression. I had no time to wonder about that then though, because although I do not recall falling asleep, my next conscious awareness was morning, my night of terror was over. I am so naive about war in actual experience by contrast to many, many people of my generation that I still did not consider my encounter with the soldiers on the street of Oran as one of war. That did not come until a day or two later. First, I returned to the railroad station, which by the time I awakened was already open. After a long while the train left for Algiers, Algeria’s largest city and the end of the line for this train. Arriving in Algiers during day...

Customer Reviews

Encounters in my travels
Beautifully written, depth of soul, awesome and inspiring are words that immediately come to mind. I love the emotion and enthusiasm that vibrates throughout the book. It was a wonderful experience for me to travel vicariously with the author. --Ruth Raynor Sirota