Beijing And Beyond: Eating (And Spending) Our Way Through China, With Personal Reflections On China's Coming-Of-Age Criminal Justice System... And Of My Fellow Travelers, 1981

In 1981, I traveled with a group of criminal justice professionals to China - or, as I like to describe it, "30 professionals and 1 anti-professional: me!" China was just opening up to the outside world. Mao Tse Tung had died only a few years before, and China's economic boom was only just being ignited. Not only was there no smog in Beijing, there were almost no cars at all. We saw wonderful things, like the Children's Palace in Shanghai, as well as scenes as depressing as both the Beijing and Shanghai prisons were, for example, or the reform school where teenage girls sang for us, tears streaming down their faces. Beyond the glimpses we were provided into a criminal justice system that was in the process of being recreated in the wake of the destructive Cultural Revolution, this is also a memoir of what it is like to travel with 30 well-heeled Americans who not only worry that there may not be enough "official work-related" visits to justify the tax write-offs they are calculating, but who also spend, spend, spend their way through China, filled with an embarrassing sense of self-importance - quick to complain when our Chinese hosts didn't quite appreciate just how important they thought themselves to be. It is based on journals I kept daily during the trip, and therefore reads as a current travelog, replete with photographs, with a difference - it being China in 1981.

A Finalist in the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Awards for his first novel, "Soul of the Matter", Michael A. Kroll is an award-winning journalist and story teller, specializing in issues of justice and injustice. Selected for "Special Recognition" by the Eugene Block Journalism Awards for "outstanding coverage of human rights issues," Kroll draws on those issues in "Soul of the Matter".

Having grown up in the beautiful Ojai Valley in Southern California, Kroll attended the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in political science and graduating in 1965, a few months after being arrested in the Free Speech Movement. He taught in an all-Chinese secondary school in the jungles of Malaysian Borneo for the Peace Corps, and taught Adult Education in East Los Angeles, Honolulu, New Orleans, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. Michael Kroll has fought against the death penalty and for criminal justice reform by working as a Mitigation Specialist in many death penalty cases, and heading such organizations as the National Moratorium on Prison Construction and the Death Penalty Information Center.

Michael has been published widely in newspapers from The New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, and in publications as disparate as The Nation and Progressive magazines on one hand, and Women's World on the other. He has had memoir pieces published, including "McCarthyism Goes Postal," (Ojai Quarterly, winter 2015-'16) and "Land Snakes Alive," (Trajectory Journal, Spring 2018). He has a published book-length memoir, "Beijing and Beyond", chronicling a 1981 tour of China's coming-of-age criminal justice system. These pieces, among others, can be found on his web page: www.michael-a-kroll.com.

Kroll leads writing workshops in juvenile halls, facilitates a memoir-writing group of seniors, and posts many of his published pieces on his website. In addition to writing, he also records as a Voice Over artist from his home studio in Oakland, California. (michaelsvoice.net).