World of Worlds opens wide windows on seldom explored terrain in Africa, Europe, India, and the United States. Far from home, on bad roads month after month, usually broke, the characters-tough, rebellious young Americans, mostly-must react quickly to survive in strange, often alluring but pitiless surroundings.

In these fifteen short stories the characters test political, cultural, and racial limits on four continents, exposing themselves to relentless existential and physical pressures that threaten their moral underpinnings and their very survival.

Within the tumultuous years 1968 to 1981, they scale mountains in the Alps, carry messages for African guerrillas under the noses of the Apartheid military, turn beggar in India, fence stolen diamonds in Central Africa, and explore the Congo River in a leaky canoe.

Richard Scott Sacks is an accomplished writer, US diplomat, and world traveler, whose career placed him in the crosshairs of diplomacy, conflict, and political consequence-crisscrossing Africa, Europe, and the Middle East in his youth, then in Foreign Service postings in Pakistan, Panama, Korea, Vietnam, Morocco, Mexico, Congo-Zaïre, and Washington, DC.Mr. Sacks's debut novel, the critically acclaimed Drinking from the Stream, has won more than a dozen accolades. His academic study with SAIS professor Riordan Roett, Paraguay: The Personalist Legacy, was named Outstanding Academic Book by Choice Magazine.A former newspaper and wire service reporter, Mr. Sacks wrote for The Miami Herald from Asunción, Paraguay, the Associated Press (Detroit, Michigan), and The Middlesex News (Framingham, Massachusetts).Mr. Sacks holds master's degrees from National War College and Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He, his wife, Aida, and their children live near Washington, DC.