Zuiker Chronicles Books

These are books written by the Zuikers:

Hiking Arizona and Beyond

Larry Zuiker has written a book about his love for hiking, and the enjoyment he gets taking friends and family on the trails of the Southwest.

Hiking Arizona and Beyond, published in 2014, chronicles Larry’s favorite hikes with details of the trails and his memories of being in those grand spaces. He includes many color photographs, showing the rattlesnakes he encountered, rivers he forded, and footbridges he crossed.

I have tried to capture my experiences of hiking some of my favorite trails in Arizona, Utah, California and Washington. The hikes presented in this book are spectacular and should be sought out by those who love hiking.

This book is dedicated to those adventurers who seek out trails in Arizona and beyond.

Hiking Arizona and Beyond is available from Lulu as a paperback.

Back Forty

Just in time for the Zuiker family reunion in July 2016, we published Back Forty by Francis C. Zuiker.

My grandfather grew up a city boy, but his heart and mind were ever in the wild, and in his 90 years, he would travel, camp and fish his way across the United States.

In this autobiographical novel, which he finished in 1962, Frank the Beachcomber recounts a boyhood year spent with his family on a farm in northern Wisconsin.

One fun note: A few times in this story, Frank uses the older and now rare word ‘shivery’, which means this, according to my two-volume The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:

Causing a shivering feeling, esp. from cold or fear.

Back Forty is available from Lulu as a paperback or e-book.

Step to Freedom

In 1965, 24-year-old Joseph Zuiker joined the U.S. Peace Corps, which sent him to a small town in the Dominican Republic. Eager to make a difference in this poor country, he hurried to integrate himself into the community of Santiago de la Cruz. After overcoming his beginner’s Spanish, dysentery and suspicion that he was a Yankee spy, he hit his stride and found a purpose to his service.

Step to Freedom: A Peace Corps Memoir of the Dominican Republic is the tale of the two years Zuiker spent in the Crossroads. His tale of travails and triumphs is a story common to Peace Corps Volunteers, but also a unique chronicle of his determination to find and fulfill a mission—to get a school built.

Written in 1968 and finally published in 2005, Step to Freedom is the product of a collaboration among three generations of Zuiker men: Joseph lived the experience; his father, Francis, chronicled it; and his eldest son, Anton, wrote the foreword and published the book.

Read the Foreword by Anton Zuiker.

See pictures of Joseph’s service and his 2004 return visit to the DR here.