The First 95 Years

A Pointillist Portrait

Ken Ford is an American physicist, teacher, and writer. He has been a pilot, a college president, and, as these essays reveal, a bit of a rebel. He is also a husband, the father of seven, and grandfather of thirteen. He rounds out his "first 95" years in 2021, having lived through three quarters of the 20th century and nearly a quarter of the 21st-through the technological revolution wrought by computers and the sociological revolution wrought by the struggle for civil rights and women's rights.

This book, with its "episodic and anecdotal" essays, is far from a conventional memoir. Yet its jumble of seemingly disjointed essays provides, in the end, a portrait of a particular person in a particular era, a restless person who has led a rich, varied, and rewarding life.