The Road to Home My Life and Times

In this humorous, learned, and moving memoir, Vartan Gregorian recounts his journey from an impoverished childhood as a Christian Armenian in Muslim Tabriz to cultured citizen of the world.Gregorian's odyssey begins in an obscure poor quarter of a provincial city (thought by some to be the location of the Garden of Eden). Childhood centered on his brilliant, beloved, illiterate grandmother who taught him so much, the beauty of Church, school, American movies, and the larger world he read about in his borrowed books. From there, he continued on to a Beirut lycee, Stanford University, and the presidencies of the New York Public Library, Brown University, and Carnegie Corporation.Like Jimmy Carter inAn Hour Before Daylight, and in the tradition of Nabokov, Jill Ker Conway, and V. S. Naipaul, he tells us that education is an openness to everything, and describes his public and private life as one education after another. This is a love story about life.

Vartan Gregorian is the twelfth president of Carnegie Corporation of New York. Previously, he served for nine years as president of Brown University and as president of the New York Public Library. Dr. Gregorian is the author of The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization, 1880-1946. His academic honors include some fifty honorary degrees. In 1998, President Clinton awarded him the National Humanities Medal.