When Doc Bascom tries to show his grade school sons how to climb a huge sycamore, he ends up dropping 12 feet flat-out on his back. Stunned, he finally gasps, So that's how it's done. And in that moment, he becomes an emblem for all fathers--trying to lead the way, failing, then getting up and trying again.

This climbing lesson is just one of 40 playful, sometimes poignant stories by award-winning author Tim Bascom, who illustrates the special bond between fathers and sons--and how that relationship must change with time. When Tim takes his own turn at fathering, he realizes that his devoted toddlers are turning into unimpressed teenagers. No longer the hero he had hoped to be, he must accept a new, flawed version of himself, not unlike his father before him.

These brief inter-linked stories show that abiding affection can still prevail, bringing fathers and sons closer, even as they tackle the steepest parts of the climb.

In 1964, at the age of three, Tim Bascom is thrust into a world of eucalyptus trees and stampeding baboons when his family moves from the Midwest to Ethiopia. The unflinchingly observant narrator of this memoir reveals his missionary parents' struggles in a sometimes hostile country. Sent reluctantly to boarding school in the capital, young Tim finds that beyond the gates enclosing that peculiar, isolated world, conflict roils Ethiopian society. When secret riot drills at school are followed with an attack by rampaging students near his parents' mission station, Tim witnesses the disintegration of his family's African idyll as Haile Selassie's empire begins to crumble.

Like Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Chameleon Days chronicles social upheaval through the keen yet naive eyes of a child. Bascom offers readers a fascinating glimpse of missionary life, much as Barbara Kingsolver did in The Poisonwood Bible.