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French Pond Road
by Anthony Catlin
Billy Kagan, hero of Anthony Catlin’s first novel, Birdman, has spent most of the previous decade living overseas after a separation from his wife and infant son. Now, returning to New England, he lives a life of seasonal employment, mainly outdoors, mainly alone. He finally has the feeling of achieving some stability and peace of mind. His isolation from the mainstream is self-induced and only broken by his dog, Casey, his workmates, and two women, Mandy Barnes, a hiker with a penchant for troubled men, and the Old Woman, a former physician stripped of her license and now living in the woods around French Pond. Angela, a freelance journalist, has raised Mickey Kagan, her grandson. In Venezuela, Angela and Mickey live with a lay Catholic missionary, Theresa, in her home on the coastal range, a center for local women who are organizing to build a road to the capital. Cata, the daughter of a woman who has been murdered for her political organizing, befriends Mickey. Back in the USA, Mickey and Cata take to the highway on a Kawasaki 650 to find Mickey’s long lost father on French Pond Road.
A story of redemption and spiritual survival against the odds, French Pond Road features Anthony Catlin’s characteristic dead-on portrayals of people, young and old, living on hope and under the radar.
Reviews for French Pond Road:
With a sure and inventive hand, Anthony Catlin weaves a compelling tableaux of disparate 21st century lives, from N.Y. ex-pats to one time missionaries to the Amazonian Yanomamo, in a tale that comes alive in today's countryside. French Pond Road is as good a read as you'll find today.
Roy Morrison, author and social activist, writes from Warner, NH
French Pond Road is a terrific road novel, populated with characters whose lives are hard, delusional and totally worth fighting for. Normal folk, in other words. Like the best road novels, French Pond Road is less about the journey than about the people who skid out on the turns.
At the end of the road is Mr. Bert Kagan, who finds himself smack in the middle of life, straddling the white line between giving up and going on. He’s an honest man with a straightforward take on truth. “One thing about reality,” he muses, “there’s no paperwork.”
Drama arrives on the back of a motorcycle—always a good sign—in the form of a pair of feral young adults, Mickey and his sultry girlfriend Cata, on the lam from the forests of Venezuela, via Florida, en route to a thunderous rendezvous with Kagan. The meeting challenges Kagan to do the right thing, but only after he tries all the wrong ones.
Catlin is a moralist, in the same way that Tolstoy was a moralist. Like characters in the Russian master’s novels, the cast of French Pond Road are serfs—tied to the great land of America, North and South—who toil and suffer in the belief that God is good, if distant, and that life’s never-ending pains in the ass are redeemable by a simple awareness of one’s own soul.
The cast of French Pond Road traverse the hemisphere in a quest to find work, honor family, pursue visions and escape a horror worse than no money—rootlessness. It’s a worry chewing at the heart of our American dream, and in French Pond Road Anthony Catlin nails it cold.
Philip Herter, a reviewer for the St. Petersburg Times and the Providence Journal, writes from New York.
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Markets, Democracy & Survival: How to Be Prosperous Without Being Self-Destructive
by Roy Morrison
Today, our central challenge is for economic growth to mean ecological improvement, not ecological destruction. This is possible if we can craft new market rules that send proper price signals. What's polluting, depleting or ecologically damaging must cost more. What's sustainable must cost less.
Roy Morrison offers a way out of our destructive cycle of growth at any cost and eventual societal collapse with an elegant and market-based solution: restructure our taxes so as to make our consumer choices lead to a sustainable and prosperous civilization. A thoroughly conceived and convincing blueprint for social activists and concerned citizens alike, Markets, Democracy & Survival is an antidote to doom and gloom.
Reviews for Markets, Democracy & Survival:
Imagine eliminating the personal and corporate income tax, the payroll tax and most federal tax returns for working Americans. Every so often an idea for sweeping change merits prioroty consideration. Consider Roy Morrison's ecological value added tax and decide whether it is better to tax what we do not want, pollution, rather than what we do want, earnings and savings.
Jim Rubens
Markets, Democracy & Survival is bold, provocative and optimistic. This is esential reading for anyone interested in forging a sustainable future.
Sonia Shah
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