THE UNFOUNDING OF AMERICA
2024, nonfiction, politics, philosophy, American government
5.5 x 8.5, 208 pages, trade paperback/electronic
AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | BETTER WORLD BOOKS | BOOKS-A-MILLION | ABE BOOKS
AT WHAT POINT is it too late to rescue from collapse a nation given at birth the means to prevent collapse? Since the principles responsible for the creation of America have always been required in equal measure to sustain America, what force in America today is capable of restoring, as opposed to bandaging, the Republic of America?
With original insight from an uncompromised perspective, The Unfounding of America repudiates charitable-bedside-manner diagnoses to describe America’s true health, spotlight crippling historical self-betrayals and lost rights-defending opportunities, and identify the systems, conditions, and popular save-America endeavors guaranteed to prevent the “saving” of America. In conclusion, it provides the fundamental answer to the question of authoritarian trespass and presents a long-overdue Second Declaration of Independence. Readers who doubt The Unfounding‘s prognoses need only vote, hope, and wait a little longer for the ultimate second opinion — uncharitable reality — to arrive bearing a citizenry’s invitation.
WINTERDANSE: THE MISPLACED ART OF SNOW BALLET
2022, nonfiction, winter sports, art performance
8.5 x 11, 336 pages, illustrated, hardcover/trade paperback
Recipient of the 2024 International Skiing History Association’s Ullr Book Award.
THE STORY OF BALLET SKIING is one of unrealized adulthood: a child of clashing influences became a mentor-deprived adolescent, ultimately orphaned and abandoned while searching for self. This wandering youngster answered to a mélange of shifting monikers – Trick, Exotic, Hotdog, Freestyle, Stunt, Ballet, Acro – with Skiing for a surname and blessings by officialdom as inspiration. Winterdanse contemplates the foreshortened life of skiing’s most creative discipline from the perspective of an athlete who presented it as art, and who understood what was required to sustain it. Or foster its return.
Richly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, letters, journal entries, competition documents, performance programs, and news-article excerpts spanning 50 years, Winterdanse is not just about skiing, but about innovation, discovery, and the influence of contemporary culture on sport and art. It is about finding oneself on a road, a good road but not the right road, only to discern that the right road does not yet exist. It is about building a new road with little more than the conviction that it can be built. It is about thinking independently and owning the consequences.
From Bob Soden, Director, International Skiing History Association
Michael Russell’s Winterdanse is a passionate cri du coeur about the author’s career in freestyle skiing — his triumphs, his failures, and his struggles to have the purity of the art form acknowledged and accepted.
Russell takes us through his dozen years in the sport, pushing the balletic envelope, struggling against the rigidity of many judges and an increasing move in the sport towards “confining” the art form and the establishment of fixed and defined moves — all to make it more digestible and categorizable for the judging panels. Amply and handsomely illustrated with classic photographs and documented with newspaper clippings, copies of score sheets and hand-drawn choreographic layouts, this is one of the first, if not the first, comprehensively reported works on the development of the freestyle movement, its growing pains, its eventual acceptance as an Olympic event and, ultimately, its original form falling from grace in the world of skiing competition.
Winterdanse is an important contribution to the history of skiing and its possibilities.
From Doug Pfeiffer, former Editor-in-Chief of Skiing, PSIA Co-Founder, 1987 U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame Inductee, widely esteemed “father of freestyle skiing”
Mike was into serious ballet. He had an obsessive desire to recreate the art for performance on snow. His book, Winterdanse: The Misplaced Art of Snow Ballet, though not for everyone and sure to upset some, is an impressive and important work.
Honor Student
Second Edition
2019, fiction, young adult education, coming of age
5.5 x 8.5, 250 pages
hardcover/trade paperback/electronic
AT A TYPICAL PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL in an average American city, a student is asking questions his teachers cannot answer. To his guidance counselor, his behavior is inexplicable and unnerving. To his father, the school principal, he is an embarrassment. To the future of government-controlled education, he is a threat. Kevin Saunders should be a straight-A student, yet he is failing his easiest classes as if by design.
Honor Student, first published in 1989, tells the story of a young man’s fight for ownership of his mind, and of an ex-teacher’s struggle against self-betrayal. Its theme, the role of reason in education, is addressed to anyone who has ever attended public school, but particularly to those whose minds may yet survive it.
Once Upon a Time on a Bicycle
2018, nonfiction/illustrated,
motivational, bicycling
6 x 9, 316 pages
hardcover/trade paperback/electronic
Take the hard road, if it’s the right road.
IT WAS NOT THE FIRST TIME Michael Renati had peddled toward a horizon thousands of miles away, but never before had there been no horizon. With his life reduced to what his bicycle can carry, he sets out alone with only one goal in mind: to become a stranger navigating strange lands under his own power. Headwinds and climbs, tailwinds and descents, exploration, introspection, vision, and resolve poignantly blend with exotic-locale photography to tell the true story of a man on an all-or-nothing self-propelled journey of necessity.
From novelist Richard S. Wheeler, six-time Spur Award Winner and recipient of the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement
This is a compelling story of a long bicycle ride, from the American Southwest to Central America. It is an interweaving of two journeys: one geographic and the other, interior and ethical. As we explore these pages we see a great adventure, planned and executed with a realistic grasp of the dangers – and beauties – awaiting the traveler. The gifted author’s story is absorbing, perceptive, and evocative. From the seat of a touring bicycle we see country and people close-up. We sense trouble as it arrives, magic when smiles greet the rider, and comfort in villages, cities, and landscapes. This is an elegant book brimming with photographs, wisely kept to black and white, offering a visual dessert.
Once Upon a Time on a Bicycle is too big to compress into genre and far more than an adventure. It is a love story.
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