FOR YOUR INFORMATION
This is perhaps the most different book I've written to date. It is obvious that I have been quite taken by the fate of the young lion, which is a story that appeared in the CLINTON COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY'S newsletter this spring.
Cobbled together in this
work is the cruel and unusual treatment of that pet lion named Zimba; then
this work veers off to present a bizarre and chilling episode in The
Case of Thomas N, a novel by John David Morley, a novel I read thirty years
ago but which has never left my consciousness. It relates to the cage
awaiting those who escape the demands of freedom for comfort and complacency
but relegates them to self-imprisonment.
Often those determined
to escape the demands of freedom fall into the magnetic field and senseless
cruelty of prominent political leaders or evangelical preachers who angle for
their vote or for their coin only to see them for that deception fall from
grace and into Dante’s Hell.
In this very brief book,
the reader encounters the cruelty to Zimba, the nightmarish experience of Thomas
N with the man at the window, and then the crushing cruelty of US
presidents, evangelical preachers and prominent celebrities -- all richly
profiled - to suggest we are in a cultural drift away from our essence due to
the “failure of memory” and the “failure of conscience."
America has increasingly
departed from its core values since World War Two with shame no longer having
purchase and civil discourse by everyone taking everything personal.
As a consequence, this
writer argues, society has become a collection of inexplicable pockets of
insular metaphorical cages at all socioeconomic levels of American society not
unlike that of the cage of the doomed Zimba.
Description of the book:
This is a story in two parts: first, it is the story of a lion cub that could fit into the palm of one's hand at birth only to grow to a two-year-old mature lion in an unnatural environment, there to be unwittingly destroyed for behaving in its innocence like a lion. Deplorable as that might be, what say we of men who exploit the trust of people who trust them? The second story deals with this "Failure of Memory" and "Failure of Conscience" as a display of human cruelties of another kind. Humans trust certain men to lead them to safety, not drive them into their own darkness. When men do, and show no shame for doing so, as they do in this story, the betrayal is as certain as that experienced by Zimba.
Amazon Kindle Paperback: $18.00: Amazon Kindle E-BOOK: $9.99. Both editions have all the same content:132 pages, photographs of lions in their native habitat, and other photos.
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