Fireball Lily offers a vivid, firsthand account of Christa-Maria Beardsley's wide-ranging global travels, an endeavor she pursued energetically for a full fifteen years after her retirement from academia. From the Buddhist monasteries of Thailand and Japan and the imposing grandeur of Victoria, Niagara, and Iguazú Falls to the moai of Easter Island, the North Pole's otherworldly beauty, and the stark poverty of Hong Kong's fishing communities, Ms. Beardsley's destinations elicit her fascination with the varied expressions of both nature and human culture. Informed by a rich personal history and an enduring concern for human suffering, the author's keenly appreciative eye takes in the full range of socioeconomic conditions - from the tragic to the unimaginably luxurious - and the virtually endless quirks of human personality. Indeed, at the heart of the author's travelogue are the people she meets along the way, a cast of characters she treats with her hallmark blend of curiosity, humor, and moral discernment.
Born in 1932 in Hannover, Germany, Christa-Maria Beardsley immigrated to a Michigan farming community in 1954. In 1968, after spending her junior year abroad in Aix-en-Provence, she graduated from Indiana University-Bloomington with a BA in Germanic languages and literature, and she earned a PhD in the same discipline, again at IU-Bloomington, in 1972. She taught at IU-South Bend for the next twenty years, developing several summer programs for overseas study in Germany and publishing two books of literary criticism: E. T. A. Hoffmann: Die Gestalt des Meisters in seinen Märchen (1975) and E. T. A. Hoffmanns Tierfiguren im Kontext der Romantik (1985). Passionate about classical music, Ms. Beardsley moved back to Bloomington in 1995, when she began hosting house concerts that spotlighted performances by students from IU's Jacobs School of Music. Since her retirement, she has traveled extensively around the world, visiting places as far-flung as Antarctica, Mongolia, and the North Pole.
