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JJ Semple
Author, Editor (anthology), Service Provider
Tales of the Tinkertoy
JJ Semple, author

Adult; General Fiction (including literary and historical); (Publish)

Today, this book could not be published. Nevertheless, despite its “lavish use of freewheeling, multiethnic caricature,” it has been. That it stands up to a steady stream of accusations and invective that rule the Internet will depend on readers who value truth and logic because it most certainly does not pass muster according to the precepts of Presentism, defined by Webster as an attitude toward the past dominated by present-day attitudes and experiences, meaning that if you were born one or two centuries ago, you were probably a racist, sexist, and ageist, the inference being, the person accusing you  would not have been.

It's in this context that we meet Gus Mazur, a young man who’s making the same mistakes you and I made when we were twenty-something. It’s 1968, the sexual revolution. Gus deludes himself into believing sex with liberated women will ease his frustrations about the compromises he’s forced to make at work.

Ambitious, Gus has the brains to rise to the top of network television. Yet, as the only non-white producer at WBN, he’s ambivalent about an industry that values money over narrative, politics over truth. He chafes when he's obliged to run civil rights and Vietnam stories that hide the truth from the American people. But the money is good and there aren’t that many opportunities “for someone like him.”

He tries everything short of a sex change in a frantic search for love. One woman is determined to set him straight. She gets her chance after Gus is waylaid in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, helping him piece his life back together.

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