Search results for ""Author Neil Rolde""

The Honorable Jonathan Jackson, an ex-state legislator and former gubernatorial assistant, is trying to puzzle out and understand one of those mind-boggling tragedies that occur from time to time in the course of U.S. public life an assassination. In this case, the victim was the man he worked for, Governor Richard N. Ellery. The anguish of this tragedy is compounded by the identity of the killer Jonathan Jackson s boyhood friend, a would-be Hollywood actor hung up on the dream of American success. The climactic action is set against the backdrop of a National Governors Conference in Los Angeles, a panorama of America s governing elite where governors and staff members, the media and entertainers have gathered for a final evening featuring an address by the president of the United States. This is also simultaneously the scene of the budding love story between Jackson and the lovely TV news anchor who would become his wife. Here, in the guise of a novel, is a view of our political system from within from municipalities to counties to a state and its ties to Washington, D.C. Whether it s walking Main Street to get the votes or debating gun control issues in a crowded auditorium, the real side of politics and government in O. Murray Carr springs to life in an engrossing tale that dramatically mirrors the way our country works.

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The inspiration for this book came from the tiny Pacific island of Kosrae in Micronesia, where Brewer native and Bangor Theological Seminary graduate the Reverend Galen Snow converted all of the natives to Christianity, and Portlander Harry Skillins left a record as a vicious pirate and who sired a line of descendants by native women. Others in these twenty chapters are far better known, such as poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Pulitzer Prize winner Edna St. Vincent Millay, opera singer Lillian Nordica, and Hollywood movie director John Ford. But whether it is Woolwich's Sir William Phips, the wilderness shepherd boy who went to sea and found a Spanish treasure and was knighted by the king of England, or Brunswick's Asa Simpson, the forty-niner who built a lumber and shipping empire in Oregon, or John Frank Stevens of West Bath, the noted engineer who made the Panama Canal possible, or Franklin County's Mark Walker, a 1930s' radical during the Great Depression, these stories, varied as they are, provide a continuous range of Mainers' contributions to the world at large. Told chronologically from the time of pre-history Indians in Maine, they end in the present with a look at our current connections overseas and at several Maine women who have dedicated their lives to helping the poor in Central and South America.

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