Shelby Tucker (James Shelby Tucker Jr.) was a dual-national American and British lawyer and journalist, and the author of: (1) Among Insurgents: Walking Through Burma, the story of his trek from China to India through the Kachin highlands of northern Burma; (2) Burma: The Curse of Independence, a 'plain man's guide' to Burma's perennial strife; (3) The Last Banana: Dancing with the Watu, about David Livingstone's quest for 'God's highway', the role of the Greeks in bringing the 'three Cs' (commerce, Christianity and civilization) to Tanganyika, and Tucker's African travels; (4) Client Service, a satirical novel about an offshore financial company, drawn from a moment in the sixties when Tucker was a 'financial counsellor' for Bernie Cornfeld's notorious Investors Overseas Services; and (5) (jointly with Ilona Gruber Drivdal) Poetry and Thinking of the Chagga, a translation of a German missionary's study of the beliefs and customs of the Chagga peoples of German East Africa that had been published in 1909.
Early years
Tucker was born on 1 March 1935 in Ripley, Tennessee,(5) the eldest son of James Shelby Tucker and Louise Nowlin Tucker, and educated at Saint Stanislaus College (Bay St. Louis MS), East High School (Memphis TN), Phillips Academy, Andover, Yale University, Corpus Christi College, Oxford University and Tulane Law School.(6) He was called to the bar in Louisiana and New York(7) and admitted to practice before the Fifth, Second and Eleventh United States Circuit Courts of Appeal and the United States Supreme Court. He has practiced law in London, New York City, New Orleans, Wellington, New Zealand and Perth, Western Australia. In Zanzibar in 1976 he married Carole Shelby Carnes, a distant cousin. Acting for his wife in Tucker v. Summers, he changed the rules governing admission of foreign-trained lawyers to the Louisiana bar.(8). He is the half-brother of Bruen Tucker, a distinguished member of the Oregon Society of CPA and accomplished golfer with an almost trusted handicap of 5.
Travels
Tucker expounded his passion for travel in an interview for the Andover Bulletin: 'Spanish has an expression for monomania. "Cada loco tiene su tema" —every lunatic has his theme. Mine, for most of my life, has been the open road, wherever it leads.'(9) When he was 17, he left his father asleep in their hotel room in Shreveport and hitchhiked to the Pacific coast and on to Yellowstone Park, Salt Lake City, Denver, El Paso and Mexico City, returning home after three weeks in time for school.(10) Nine months later, he boarded a tanker as supercargo, sailed to Venezuela and on to Haifa, then hitchhiked around Israel and most of Western Europe.(11) Two summers later, he hitchhiked across North Africa.(12) In 1957, while an undergraduate at Oxford, he attended the VIth World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow, then travelled through Siberia to Peking, notwithstanding a US government ban on travel there.(13) After leaving Oxford, he hitchhiked to Egypt.(14) In 1960–2, he spent eight months hitchhiking from England to and around the Indian subcontinent,(15) then signed on a freighter bound for New Zealand and hitchhiked through New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Japan, then signed on a freighter bound for California and hitchhiked to Alaska.(16) He drove from Europe to Saudi Arabia via Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, and returned via Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco in 1965, and two years later hitchhiked from Rio de Janeiro to Buenos Aires, Santiago, La Paz, Cuzco, Machu Picchu, Lima and Bogota, walked along ancient Indian trails through the jungle to Panama, then hitchhiked to Mississippi through Central America and Mexico.(17) In 1967 he made the first of 16 trips to sub-Saharan Africa.(18) In 1972, after the government of Ethiopia closed its border with Sudan, he rode into Metemma on a camel.(19) His honeymoon after his marriage in Zanzibar in 1976, was overlanding back to England via the Nile, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.(20) After hitching around Malawi in 1988, he returned to England via Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey.(21) In 1989, the year following his Among Insurgents trek, he trekked around eastern Burma with the Karen National Liberation Army.(22) In 2002, he crossed the Atlantic in a sailboat.(23) He returned to New Zealand in 2006 and Australia in 2007 to hitchhike to places he had not reached in 1961-2(24) and in 2010-11 repeated his 1960 hitchhiking trip through the Middle East and around the Indian subcontinent.(25)