“Conrad- I finished reading your manuscript, it was riveting! I think it should be made into a movie. You provided me with an enlightening look into a country I knew very little about, and into a fellow West Pointer who, after reading his work, I feel I could call a friend and a compatriot.”  - Kevin Mckeown, West Point Class of 1977

 Winner of 2011 Royal Palm Literary Award

Little about Conrad Taylor’s primitive upbringing, in a remote mining town in the upper reaches of the Amazon jungle, prepared him for a first-of-a-kind scholarship to the United States Military Academy during Age-of-Aquarius America. An extraordinary opportunity for most, West Point was a life-changer for him. Culture shock hardened the ensuing experience. Third World politics tested it - severely.

Path to Freedom: My Story of Perseverance is an inspirational memoir. It charts a sometimes-humorous journey of perseverance, resilience, hope, survival, and love, as its author traverses between Guyana and the highly-regimented United States Military Academy – at the height of the Vietnam War. It has a simple proposition - fly-or-die. The narrative sums up rude awakenings, especially after West Point - because of West Point.  

The book describes what happened upon the author’s return in 1973 to a government turned repressive, anti-American, and paranoid - almost overnight. The Soviet-leaning, Cold-War-era dictatorship feared regime change. Its leaders obsessed about him being in cahoots with the United States. His was the impossible task of proving that he was not – or else!

Taylor’s journey forged a unique prism through which aficionados of true stories could get a peek at the cultural trauma of emigration, the unique experience that is West Point, the personal side of Cold-War-era geopolitics, and the mayhem of Third World politics. The view will be nostalgic for some, shocking for many, and enlightening for others. 

More than a memoir, Path to Freedom: My Story of Perseverance has a cinematic backdrop. It is set in Guyana, an underdeveloped Amazonian region of South America and the wind-swept plains of West Point. The book’s travelogue element - exotic ecology, culture, politics, history, and architecture - is captivating.

The truth-is-stranger-than-fiction arc of the historically-accurate Path to Freedom and its unsophisticated, naive foreigner-at-West Point aspect is riveting.

Path to Freedom: My Story of Perseverance reads like a novel.

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