But in My Case

About the Book

This book tells the eighty-year story of the author’s life in America and abroad. He attended local schools in Berkeley and, upon graduation from Berkeley High School in 1955, enrolled at the University of California, graduating with a degree in architecture in 1960. He then obtained a PhD in city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and returned to Berkeley in 1964 to join the faculty of its department of that name. After an academic career of some fifty years in departments of planning, engineering, and geography, he retired from teaching in 2008 at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and became a senior research scholar in the Population Program, which he directed for twenty years at the university’s Institute of Behavioral Science.

About the Author

The author’s parents were part of the massive emigration of White Russians who left their country at the very end of the Civil War that engulfed Russia after the Communist Revolution of 1917. They first lived in Harbin, then moved to Shanghai, where the author, who was born in1937, grew up. Shanghai was under Japanese occupation during World War II and in March 1949 was surrounded by Mao Tse Tung’s communist troops, prompting a departure for San Francisco on the ocean liner S.S. Cleveland of the American President Lines in 1950, beginning the family’s odyssey in the United States.