A Life Out of Whack, Volume 5: Confessions and Reflexions of an Un-American All-American

"The book has two parts. The first part is autobiographical and sketches the atypical early life of a future academic scholar from family poverty to marriage and divorce at nineteen, from eight years in big-city and federal law enforcement to starting college at the age of twenty-six, culminating with a doctoral fellowship in French Studies at Brown U. The second part presents an alternative critical look at contemporary life and ethos in general and American culture in particular. Fashioned from a journal I've kept since the events of 9/11, it consists primarily of my reflections and positions on a wide variety of philosophical, political, and cultural subjects, such as aging, nature, corporate capitalism, and American, French, and global cultures."-- Provided by publisher A Life Out of Whack has two parts. The first part is autobiographical and sketches the atypical early life of a future academic scholar from family poverty to marriage and divorce at nineteen, from eight years in big-city and federal law enforcement to starting college at the age of twenty-six, culminating with a doctoral fellowship in French Studies at Brown U. The second part presents an alternative critical look at contemporary life and ethos: aging, nature, corporate capitalism, and American, French, and global cultures. Part memoir of the author's early life—including his experience as a New York City cop and a US Border Patrol agent before he became a college professor—and part polemical discussions of a host of diverse topics, from aging, religion, and war to teaching and higher learning, corporate capitalism and consumerism, technology and media, this book challenges the beliefs and behavior of the American way as it recounts the unusual, "out of whack," life and mind of an iconoclastic "Un-American, All-American" baby-boomer.