Wonderment: A love affair with adventure, travel, writing, philosophy, and family life

Nigel Hey's sixth book, Wonderment: A Love Affair with Adventure, Writing, Travel, Philosophy, and Family Life, is more than an autobiography about an English-American science writer -- it is a trip around the world and around the mind.

The heart of this fast-paced story lies in its varied, thoughtful, and sometimes hilarious collection of memoirs about writing, printing, publishing, media, Native Americans, the American mountain states, world travel, and amateur theatre. These are linked with the author's philosophical thoughts and observations on the trials and triumphs of a family life shared between London and New Mexico.

Hey considers that his life has been both enriched and at times endangered by an apparently insatiable curiosity that has filled his world with adventures of mind and body. In his boyhood his parents take him to a new home, touching off a semi-nomadic five years that eventually take him to the American West, torn between a love of his native Lancashire and the unknowns of future life. Small-town realities in an all-Mormon community teach him the lessons of being an outsider and awake a spirit of independent thought and action. With his university years complete, he heads for his first fulltime job, in Bermuda, then a second in England. These mark the start of an exhilarating rollercoaster life in which he achieves professional success while fulfilling the responsibilities of parenthood and enduring the heartaches of two failed marriages. Throughout, he lives the life of a genuinely curious man, exploring the vestiges of colonial Spain that survive in the mountains of the American Southwest, driving a tunnel in the remote mountains of Greece, dancing with native Americans, uncovering the history of high-tech Soviet weapon science, exploring his Yorkshire and Lancashire roots, traveling the world.

The story is laced with scores of real-life anecdotes as Nigel Hey explores his personal philosophy and tackles the biggest question of all - where does he really belong?