Searching the Andes for Albert Schweitzer

About the Book

Alex Half-Moon Peoples knows he’s one of the walking wounded. As an international journalist, he knows, too, that abject poverty and global injustice breed terrorism. Having witnessed one massacre, famine, epidemic, or civil war after another during his years in Africa, he dreams every night children are starving to death and it is his job to save them. Returning to the States has only increased his anxiety. Exactly five hundred years post-Christopher Columbus, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is getting worse, not better. When sixties’ friend Paul invites him to visit one of the poorest, most war-torn countries in South America to report on a potentially life-affirming narrative encoded on an ancient, broken urn, he feels compelled to go. What he unearths will change his life.

A story of redemption as much as discovery – the chronicle of a mixed-race nomad who both wants and does not want to belong, an overzealous do-gooder disgusted by zealotry, a man who longs to love, but who struggles each day just to heal his own brokenness – Searching the Andes for Albert Schweitzer probes the mysteries of the human heart.

About the Author

Jon Peterson lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and four children and practices psychotherapy in nearby Pleasanton, California. After completing his MD and residency in psychiatry, he obtained an MA in English leading to a second career teaching humanities courses at local colleges.