Search results for ""Author Derf Backderf""

From bestselling author Derf Backderf comes the untold story of the Kent State shootings—timed for the 50th anniversary On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard gunned down unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University. In a deadly barrage of 67 shots, 4 students were killed and 9 shot and wounded. It was the day America turned guns on its own children—a shocking event burned into our national memory. A few days prior, 10-year-old Derf Backderf saw those same Guardsmen patrolling his nearby hometown, sent in by the governor to crush a trucker strike. Using the journalism skills he employed on My Friend Dahmer and Trashed, Backderf has conducted extensive interviews and research to explore the lives of these four young people and the events of those four days in May, when the country seemed on the brink of tearing apart. Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, which will be published in time for the 50th anniversary of the tragedy, is a moving and troubling story about the bitter price of dissent—as relevant today as it was in 1970.

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My Friend Dahmer is the hauntingly original graphic novel by Derf Backderf, the award winning political cartoonist. In these pages, Backderf tries to make sense of Jeffery Dahmer, the future serial killer with whom he shared classrooms, hallways, libraries and car rides. What emerges is a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a young man struggling helplessly against the urges, some ghastly, bubbling up from the deep recesses of his psyche. The Dahmer recounted here, although universally regarded as an inhumane monster, is a lonely oddball who, in reality, is all too human. A shy kid sucked inexorably into madness while the adults in his life fail him. The crimes Dahmer committed are incredibly depraved, infamous and unforgettable, but in My Friend Dahmer, Backderf provides profound insight into how, and more important, why Jeffery Dahmer transformed from a high school loner into the most depraved serial killer since Jack the Ripper, coming as close as anyone yet has to explaining the seemingly unexplainable phenomenon of Jeffery Dahmer.

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Every week we pile our rubbish out on the pavement. We go to work and when we return it’s gone. Like magic! The reality is anything but, of course. Trashed, Derf Backderf’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed, award-winning national bestseller My Friend Dahmer, is a working man’s epic. An ode to the crap job of all crap jobs—but anyone who has ever been trapped in a soul-sucking gig can relate to this tale. Trashed takes place after Derf graduates high school, when he and his childhood pals find themselves working as garbagemen in their Midwestern hometown. Together they clean the streets of pile after pile of stinking garbage, overcoming the unique difficulties of each season and battling small-town bureaucrats and nuisances, all while trying to decide what they want to do with their lives. Interspersed are non-fiction pages that detail the history of trash, the staggering volume of garbage that is produced every day, the nuts and bolts of how our trash is disposed of beyond curbside recycling and what happens to it once it’s removed from our houses, our streets and our office buildings. Inspired by Derf’s own experiences, Trashed (like My Friend Dahmer) is a hilarious, stomach-churning, in-depth examination of this vast, unknown world, taking readers to a place they have never been before, in a way that only Derf, and comics, can.

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Every week we pile our rubbish out on the pavement. We go to work and when we return it’s gone. Like magic! The reality is anything but, of course. Trashed, Derf Backderf’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed, award-winning national bestseller My Friend Dahmer, is a working man’s epic. An ode to the crap job of all crap jobs—but anyone who has ever been trapped in a soul-sucking gig can relate to this tale. Trashed takes place after Derf graduates high school, when he and his childhood pals find themselves working as garbagemen in their Midwestern hometown. Together they clean the streets of pile after pile of stinking garbage, overcoming the unique difficulties of each season and battling small-town bureaucrats and nuisances, all while trying to decide what they want to do with their lives. Interspersed are non-fiction pages that detail the history of trash, the staggering volume of garbage that is produced every day, the nuts and bolts of how our trash is disposed of beyond curbside recycling and what happens to it once it’s removed from our houses, our streets and our office buildings. Inspired by Derf’s own experiences, Trashed (like My Friend Dahmer) is a hilarious, stomach-churning, in-depth examination of this vast, unknown world, taking readers to a place they have never been before, in a way that only Derf, and comics, can.

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