Description
In the second book of a trilogy, Larry Wahl (aka Lewis X. Vallian) describes his dysfunctional adult years, providing insight into a young life filled with failed marriages, failed jobs, and extensive learning experiences. The author examines the processes that, 50 years later, resulted in his receiving the first – and probably only – patent on the 4th dimension.
Larry E. Wahl narrates the experiences that brought him to where he is today, at the age of 84, in his new book, “The Vallian Trilogy: An Inventive Life. Part 2, The Learner.” His difficult upbringing and eventual journey to become a productive adult will resonate with readers who are trying to make sense of their lives.
Having spent a disturbing childhood with a variety of families – his birth family in Oregon, gangster Al Capone’s family in Chicago, a family of 200 Sisters of Charity in a Vancouver, Washington orphanage, and finally an adoptive family – Larry Wahl continues the discussion with episodes in his remarkable life as a young adult, starting where he left off in Part I. This intriguing second book demonstrates how he pursued life on his own terms, focused on learning “everything about everything”.
After graduating from high school and being “section eighted” out of the Navy, he finds himself an unconscious volunteer in the OSS – soon to become the CIA. When he wasn’t carrying out “missions,” he was furthering his learning through multiple jobs and wives. He refers to himself and his fellow assassins as garbage who were expected to commit suicide at some later point, but it didn’t turn out that way for Larry. With wife #4 (now 52 years together), he was finally able to find stability and establish his real career as an artist as well as start on the road to being a geometer and inventor.
Larry is an equal opportunity insulter, but supports and even mentors those individuals he believes in. His unique writing style is often elegant, occasionally crude, and his experiences encompass horror and humor, pain and pleasure, despair and desire. He frequently employs self deprecation and weird metaphors as he attempts to understand his own behavior and the motivations of the people that became part of his life and who continue as part of his survival, awake and asleep. He is forever “The Learner.”
Larry contends that this accounting of his life can be a guide for others, who have experienced difficulties in their life-paths by being an example of survival and growth in the face of adversity, much of it self-created. His pain and sadness, interjected with humor can show others that they can overcome the obstacles that life throws their way and find their own unique means of contributing to society.
