Even though Rob and Bose Whitman are identical twins and leading- edge baby boomers, everything for them is not ditto.
Bose sprints through high school athletics, DJs a program called "Blues Before Breakfast" on the campus radio station and takes part in the protests against the war in Vietnam during the day.Rob is crazy about baseball, has an interest in psychology, and meets Rochelle in a journalism class. Her family runs a dog kennel and it is no surprise that she becomes a legal advocate against the cruelty to animals used in laboratory testing.
In 1969, after receiving a letter that Bose is missing in action in southeast Asia, Rob and his parents are thrown into turmoil. It just did not make sense.
Rob's life moves toward increasing stability, as he becomes a licensed psychologist in Wisconsin, marries, and begins a family.
Bose's fate is still in limbo, and why is Atsuko crying during the ride home? Arguing over whether the Sixties actually comes to an end in 1974, or how to define yuppiedom, and why punks have wrapped the rally cry of peace, love, and harmony all in black, seems of little consequence or consolation to Rob who feels like his life has been bisected with his twin brother's disappearance.
The theme of divergent paths, midlife crisis, and the quest for reconciliation and convergence weaves its way through fifty years of life in America.
About the Author:
Brian Hammond is a former English teacher in the Minnesota Community College system with degrees in Humanities, Psychology, Education, and English. He is the author of several other books. Two are short story collections entitled The Juvenile Stories and Happily Ever After. His book Keep Harmon Open: An Urban Homesteader's Journal is a satiric account of inner-city life which was also included in an anthology called Downtown. He has written two other novels: When the Revolution Comes is set in the "counter-culture" years of the late sixties and Anima: An Archetypal Novel, which takes place in Zurich during 1916, tells of the crisscrossed paths of four of the most radical and visionary historical personages of the early 20th century.
Hammond has three other pursuits he has been engaged in for some fifty years. As a guitarist, he has taught, composed, and performed in a college 'psychedelic' band (replete with strobe lights and amplifier feedback), was a bassist in an African Fiesta band, and played in a guitar and piano duet. Currently, he is involved in putting together a jazzy-blues repertoire (hoping to finish it before arthritis has its way.)
Along with writing and music, he has worked with many art forms, from watercolor, ink, and acrylic; sculpture and woodburning; to stencils, photography, and collage. Hammond studied Tai Chi Chih over four years with Richard Harris and co-facilitated a group of men in a dance form or artsport called contact improvisation. An avid tennis player for thirty years, Hammond, now at 73, considers himself an 'advanced' walker.
As an advocate of the humanities, the author still has strong academic interests in the early and high Modernist Movement in the arts and literature from 1880-1930, literary theory and criticism, epistemology, and cognitive science.
He is a fan of the novelists Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, and the late Jim Harrison. Last summer, he enjoyed Toni Morrison's novel Jazz, as well as lamented her passing.
