This book is full of surprises and reminiscences. Klaus Pringsheim Jr.'s life is full of twists and turns, encounters with history And personalities, a life of the unexpected and the strange. It is also a book full of insights and commentary on the crucial events of the past half-century as seen and experienced by a man who has lived in four different cultures. Klaus Pringsheim Jr. is the adopted son of Klaus Pringdheim Sr. (1883-1972) who was a renowned conductor, composer, and assistant to Gustav Mahler. He is also the grandson of Alfred Pringsheim, the great porcelain collector, mathematician and supporter of Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival. He is finall the nephew of Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize Winner and hence a cousin of Golo and Klaus Mann. Klaus Pringsheim Jr. grew up in Berlin in the 1930s and as a child, witnessed the rise of Nazism and Adolf Hitler. He fled to Tokyo, Japan in 1939, to escape military service, and there lived with his father, remaining in Japan throughout the war in the Pacific. He was arrested and imprisioned by the Japanese in early 1945 as a spy suspect. At the end of the war he became a press censor for the U.S. Occupation authorities in Japan. In the later 1940s he went to live with Thomas Mann and the Mann family in Pacific Palisades near Los Angeles. After attending UCLA and Columbia University and teaching at the California State University at Hatward, and the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS, he came to Canada to teach Japanese and Chinese Politics at Mc Master University in Hamilton, Ont.