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Sunday, October 30, 2011

Amy Goodman on Occupy Wall Street: 'Pundits know so little about so much...'

Posted by Bob Sommer

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The Francis D. Sommer Memorial Fund for Homeless Veterans

The Francis D. Sommer Memorial Fund for Homeless Veterans
Francis D. Sommer (5/12/1983 - 2/11/2011)

Uncommon Writings: Selected Posts and Articles

  • "'Elegy for Francis': One Year Later"
  • "Collateral Damage: 'Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan'"
  • "Remembering homeless vets on Veterans Day"
  • " 'A funeral pyre for American thought': The Decline of Reading and Who Benefits from It"
  • "No, We're Not from Texas" (a personal essay about a soldier's homecoming, published in Prick of the Spindle)
  • Sebastian Junger's War (my review in Rain Taxi Review of Books)
  • Bringing the War Home: 'The Hurt Locker'
  • David Bates: The Katrina Paintings
  • "Playing from Memory" (Editor's Choice nominee for the storySouth Million Writers Award)
  • "Plaza Light" (a fictional tribute to John Lennon, first published in Cantaraville)
  • How a bill became a deal: Kansas Gov. Mark Parkinson's 'compromise' with Sunflower Electric
  • "A Curtain Call for the Hyde Park Playhouse," published in Chronogram
  • Bill Ayers' Fugitive Days reviewed
  • The Townhouse Explosion
  • "Court TV"
  • Rick Santelli's Rant
  • "I'm just tired of hate": The mother of a student counterprotesting the Westboro Church
  • "The Education of David Frost"
  • "The Most Important Election of Our Time"

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Blogging on culture, politics, and the environment since 2008

Great news!

My new novel, A Great Fullness, is slated for publication next year by indie publisher Aqueous Books. Set in Kansas during the period from the internet bubble of the mid-1990s through the early years of the Iraq War, A Great Fullness is the story of a girl who lives with a secret that even she doesn’t know she possesses – the truth about her mother’s death.




Where the Wind Blew

Where the Wind Blew
When Borders Books went down, it took with it the distributor for Where the Wind Blew. As a result Signed First Editions are now available at a very low price through Laertes Books. To learn more, please click on the image.

What they're saying about Where the Wind Blew

"... a masterful job of evoking memories of the halcyon days of political activism."
--The Baby Boomer Brief

"This blistering, fast-paced tale of a man whose radical past catches up with him ... cross-examines our culture, then and now." --Chronogram

“I had a hard time putting WHERE THE WIND BLEW down.” —Robert Pardun, author of Prairie Radical: A Journey through the Sixties

Scroll down for more commentary and excerpts from WHERE THE WIND BLEW.

'Old books, rare books, good books!'

Lucifer and Mammon, by Joseph Moser

Lucifer and Mammon, by Joseph Moser
A very rare First Edition. Near Fine. Available from Laertes Books.

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Signed copies available through Laertes Books. Click the image.

What they're saying about 'Where the Wind Blew'...

“This blistering, fast-paced tale of a man whose radical past catches up with him…cross-examines our culture, then and now.”
—Nina Shengold, Chronogram

“WHERE THE WIND BLEW is a story of the past and an allegory of the present.... Bob Sommer hears the music and voices of the past and gives you what America has become today.”
—Mason Williams (of “Classical Gas” fame)

“I found WHERE THE WIND BLEW engrossing and heartfelt…. Emotionally taut and historically intriguing, this novel explores the psyche of a man whose past finally catches him. Although set in the past, its themes transcend time.”
—Ron Jacobs, author of The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground


“I had a hard time putting WHERE THE WIND BLEW down.”
—Robert Pardun, author of Prairie Radical: A Journey through the Sixties


"...WHERE THE WIND BLEW is not intended to be a story about a hero but a parable of regret, and those stories are truest when the protagonists are people like us, ordinary people who are neither excessively virtuous nor intrinsically evil."
—Stephanie Eve Boone, American Book Review

“WHERE THE WIND BLEW…is sure to ignite strong reactions, regardless of political affiliation….The novel is vividly-realized, bringing both past and present to life.”
—Cynthia Reeser, Prick of the Spindle

“This story is so believable and well-told that I felt I had an insider's knowledge of what it would have been like to live through the protests on college campuses during the Vietnam War era.”
—Kristin Johnson, Whistling Shade


"I was 18 when the Vietnam War started, and the author does a wonderful job of creating a sense of time and place that brought back my memories of those days."
- Norm Jensen, onegoodmove

“I wanted to let you know that I am reading WHERE THE WIND BLEW and LOVE it!…Excellent writing! I am recommending it to everyone.”
—email from a manager at Borders

“What a great accomplishment! The emotional range in this book is just great. I felt close and attached to the characters.”
—email from a reader

Two passages from WHERE THE WIND BLEW:

From Chapter 3:

"The idea seemed not only clearer to him last night, but vital, even urgent, and the conversation comes back to him now—how they sat for a long time on a rug beside the coffee table, passing joints and downing beers, while Simon picked the tobacco of filterless cigarettes from his teeth and described his tours in Vietnam—to Peter, to a couple of others nearby, but mostly to Peter—described the sharp, booming explosions of the five-inch guns on the Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in ’64, firing hundreds of rounds into the darkness, hitting what Simon never knew, he said, ammo bunkers, VC, children, water buffalo, maybe Americans. What the fuck were we even shooting at? he asked Peter, leaning close, lowering his voice into a sharp whisper, as if Peter might explain it to him, might finally clear this up, and he waited until Peter shrugged helplessly and then continued, There’s no sense to any of it, man. No sense! He described his second tour, also, this time on a swift boat in the Mekong, where he saw a stack of rotting bodies on a buffalo path alongside the river, and what it was like to unleash the fifty-cal into a free-fire zone without a clue if they were hitting the enemy or just terrified villagers who had the bad luck to live where the VC wanted to hide. But Peter, these people—the North Vietnamese, the Vietcong—they just want their country back. They want everyone out—the French, the Americans, even the Communists. They’re nationalists, Peter. Their country’s been overrun by foreigners for decades, for centuries. He squinted, knowing what Peter would say next before he said it, and asked, Did you know that Ho Chi Minh wanted Truman’s help against the French before he went to the Communists? No, Peter said, as expected, trying to follow him, trying to piece together the fragments of unfamiliar history in his narrative, trying to listen as people came and went, as laughter and talk surrounded them, as someone strummed a guitar along with a Beethoven symphony booming through the stereo speakers; as he tried to fit classical music into the kaleidescope that whirled around him, and to connect the water buffalo and the North Vietnamese and Truman, searching for a pattern, an image, a story woven into the fabric of Simon’s talk.”

***
From Chapter 18:

“And she wondered, too, if he—if all those people like him back then—hadn’t done some of the things they did—maybe not…no, not all of them, but some of them—would anything have changed? It was true, she reasoned, that changing things meant rupturing what existed. That’s what was happening to her—right now. They had all been living on this thin, shiny veneer, living comfortable lives, fretting over trifles, burying themselves in the vicarious lives of celebrities, entertaining themselves with the false realities of reality television, but the veneer had cracked, and when they crashed through, nothing was underneath it, and they were still falling. And now she looked back up as she plunged downward and saw that all around her, that’s how others were living, though they didn’t know it yet, and anything could change their lives, just as hers changed. That was how she lived when she was young, too—while a war exploded, while the country nearly came apart. But she knew so little of what was beyond her small world. She’d been oblivious to everything else. Boyfriends, dances, dresses, music—that’s what that time meant to her, while all of this turmoil bubbled beneath it, and she wondered now, if everyone had just gone along like that, oblivious, indifferent, would the war have ever ended, would blacks still drink from separate water fountains, would the FBI spy on you?”

WHERE THE WIND BLEW (a novel), by Bob Sommer

WHERE THE WIND BLEW

WHERE THE WIND BLEW

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