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Change Your Day

A revitalized blog with one mission: to present a moment that jolts your day, triggers new thinking, gets you through traffic tangles, and relieves job stress. Or, more prosaically, accompanies you through the early miles of bike touring through France and Italy. Wherever you are, I aim to change your day.

Credit to @illuminatethearts for lighting the skies from the Ferry Building down Market Street. 

A Masterful Dark Tale of Tough and Gentle Desert Characters

4/11/2016

 
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While researching and writing my biography of Marie Equi, I had little time to read fiction. Now I can indulge and catch up on some fine work. Here's a short review of a new novel by Oregon writer James Anderson. 
 
I miss Ben Jones and his hardscrabble life in the harsh and beautiful Central Utah desert. For what seems too brief a period, I entered his world of fiercely independent characters with contradictions, delusions, and longings in an environment that only partly accommodates them. Jones encounters them all on their own ground with a mix of surprise, curiosity, some cringing, and ultimately a deep appreciation and respect.
 
In Anderson’s debut novel, Jones is a short-haul trucker along Highway 117 making deliveries to customers who jealously guard their secrets. Only desert insiders are permitted a view of what counts for daily lives – a hideaway for two brothers with a criminal past, a beautiful woman who plays an “air cello” on a first encounter, and a self-identified savior who carries a cross, literally. And then there’s the never-open desert diner, a masterful noir creation that tantalizes and then horrifies with its own dark past.
 
Anderson is a master story-teller who has created an evocative tale that is at once a diversion from our troubled times and a tonic that reveals a prevailing human resilience. His first novel leaves readers anxious for his second.  


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    Michael Helquist

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