• What is the fate of America and each of us as individuals? The Father: America Leaves the American Century addresses this vital question through four generations of the Whitaker family and their witness to the evolution of modernity. Amongst modesty of private lives in 1926 rural America, John Whitaker is born to a conflation of events, signifying paths crossed by this world with another. Conflicts in John’s family express widening chasms between changing views, from belonging to autonomy, religious belief to skepticism, self-sacrifice to self-indulgence. Eventually, John has a son of his own: Morgan. Morgan arrives in a materialistic world of public lives, captivated by potentials for fame during America’s ascendancy. Morgan also absorbs social movements against authority to wage combat with his father John as America abandons reason to become ever more dogmatic. Realizing battles with his father were impersonations of contemporary fashion, history will not be rectified as John is dead. Since Morgan cannot correct the past, he sets out to fix the future in a fistfight with society. Failing to change the world, Morgan spends his last dollar on an adventure to the Yucatan, where fate provides a woman, commencing the love story of his life. Morgan tries to inoculate their son against the ills of humanity with the wonders of nature, but Morgan’s son finds hope in the human race. Convinced he’s found redemption for civilization, Morgan’s son takes his message to a greater audience than his father, navigating a second Axial Age, fiercely attacked by Morgan on a global stage during The Great Upheaval of 2057.
• The year is 2057. The place is America. The Great Upheaval has begun, and Morgan Whitaker is dead in the opening pages of The Worst of Things: America in the 21st Century. Morgan was an intellectual brawler and a dangerous one. His splenetic indictment of his son John at a debate over the fate of a teetering America sparks a revolution. John’s escape from an assassination attempt that destroys an entire town, to the solitudes of Arctic wilderness, allows John to refine his vision for America. Unsatisfied with Enlightenment’s definition of Man and the governance it yields, John sets off for a more complete description, hunted by hostile powers along the way. From European heritage to Greek antiquity, to the home of Judeo-Christianity and on to humanity’s earliest temple in Turkey. Finally, John reaches Africa, origin of the human race, and a discovery. He already knew that America’s Founders sought to save Americans from calamity with governance of, by, and for unstable humans, but he learns too late they handed America a time bomb. As John struggles to douse the fire his father lit, national barricades to passion buckle under the assault. In a flash of tribalism, America appears as a modern-day Pompeii, buried under the Mount Vesuvius of its military-industrial complex riven between the clans. The Culture War is finally hot. Fanned by foreign clout, gorged by primate emotions, and the comforting satisfaction of hate favored by innate evolutionary psychology as John struggles to save it.
While The Worst of Things is second in The Father trilogy, it can stand alone as book one is summarized in the prologue. Learn more at TheFatherTrilogy.com or Goodreads.com.
• Third in the trilogy, Resurrection, is in development.
