(NewsUSA)
Celebrated novelist Mike Bond has been called one of the 21st Century's most exciting authors. His recently released historical epic, "America," is the first of a seven-book series that relives our last 70 years and our nation's most profound upheavals since the Civil War.
Now, in the tumultuous last years of the 1960s and through the wild, joyous, heartbroken and visionary lives of four young people, the story continues in Book Two, "Freedom."
SHIFTING LANDSCAPES AND MORAL CODES
From the war-shattered jungles of Vietnam to America's burning cities, near-death in Tibet, peace marches, the battle of the Pentagon, wild drugs, rock concerts, free love, CIA coups in Indonesia and Greece, the Six Days' War and Bobby Kennedy's last campaign, "Freedom" puts you in the Sixties as if it were now.
Bond continues the conjoined sagas of the four young people introduced in America. They've all gone their separate ways, each reacting to the political chaos of the country and the new set of moral codes as best as he or she can.
Mick leaves for the Himalayas while Troy heads to Vietnam with the Marines. Daisy starts her Ph.D. in brain research, and Tara battles heroin as her rock band reaches stardom. Troy is soon caught up in mind-numbing combat in Vietnam, while Mick returns to the States to lead the antiwar effort. Tara's band signs a Motown contract amid the Detroit riots. At Stanford, Daisy expands her study of the human brain under LSD and other mind-altering drugs. Troy falls in love with a Vietnamese teacher and is slowly losing faith in the War.
Each of these characters could carry a novel on his or her own, but Bond has done a masterful job of telling all their stories, first one and then another and another and back again, without losing momentum. He ties into the story the haunting songs of Jim Morrison, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, the unforgettable anti-war lyrics and the temptations of sex and drugs. These are educated and deeply alive young people, searching for truth and a vision of the future.
TRULY BEAUTIFUL WRITING
One reviewer called freedom "the most beautiful prose I have ever read."
Bond has been called "master of the existential thriller" by BBC, "one of America's best thriller writers" by Culture Buzz, and "one of the 21st century's most exciting authors" by The Washington Times. He is a best-selling novelist, war and human rights journalist, and ecologist. He has covered guerrilla wars, death squads and military dictatorships in Latin America and Africa, Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, and ivory poaching and other environmental battles in East Africa and Asia.
Firmly rooted in fact and history, "Freedom" is highly readable, bitterly nostalgic, romantic, heartbreaking and edifying. It is a testament to the effects of politics and moral revolutions on America and how what happened then created what we are now. Purchase at https://amzn.to/3ns2tUS
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