Flemming's World

Danish-born Flemming Carstensen has traveled the globe—from Cuba to Kenya to the Australian outback—and made his home in exotic locales from the postwar backwaters of Papua New Guinea to the highrises of Honolulu. On the cusp of his ninetieth birthday, the itinerant adventurer has now chronicled his life in Flemming’s World, a lively memoir. Readers can travel along with Carstensen as he serves with the Danish military police in occupied Germany, works on Australian cattle ranches, runs plantations in Papua New Guinea, encounters Papa Doc in Haiti and finds love in New York, among many other adventures.

Still working today as a REALTOR® Emeritus, Carstensen has held jobs as varied as copra plantation manager, freighter captain, agricultural inspector and quarantine officer. “I left school at thirteen” he says, “never went to high school. I used common sense and learned most of my skills on the job, not in a classroom.” Among the memorable characters he introduces in Flemming’s World: an ex-POW who narrowly escapes beheading by his Japanese captors; King Kam of Kitava, an Australian who was the self-appointed “king” of a South Pacific island for a half-century; and knife-wielding robbers who attack Carstensen and his wife on a country road in Kenya.

Flemming Carstensen lived in Denmark, Germany, Australia, Jamaica and Papua New Guinea before making his home in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, with his wife of forty years, the late Dr. Hortense Gandy. He currently resides at the Kāhala Nui retirement home and enjoys the companionship of his second wife, Vivian. A past president of the Adventurers’ Club of Honolulu, he still relishes sharing his tales of travel and adventure.

Softcover, 120 pp.
Author: Flemming Carstensen
Release Date: June 2018