Publisher's Synopsis
When Jack graduates from college he has no inkling of the strange events that will soon dominate his life. Fired from his job at Astro Dynamics, Jack turns to San Diego's poker parlors to pay his bills. Jack's adventures span a curious spectrum of politics, life, love, and sex in the 1960s counterculture. Jack's close friend Gene takes a job with the mysterious organization Integrated Parallax Systems. When Gene and his boss, a shadowy figure known only as the Colonel, uncover top secret government programs, Jack's carefree life turns deadly. Jack's personal life evolves in parallel with his undercover activities. His perspectives change as he matures and becomes entangled in the counterculture. Jack acquires a deeper understanding of the American political system and the pivotal events of the time, challenging long held beliefs. Experimental social arrangements like group living and open relationships become common. Jack shuns soul-killing jobs; soundly rejecting the "lives of quiet desperation" so vividly expressed by Thoreau, and seeks inventive income sources to support an unconventional lifestyle. Jack's adventures connect him to an odd cast of characters-gambling engineers, seductive secretaries, slick poker players, innovative social workers, nude dancers, Swiss bankers, secret government operatives, shrewd investors, karate experts, sexual freedom advocates, sleazy bar patrons, and veiled CIA agents. Greater San Diego provides the main venue for this work of historical fiction. The story line accurately depicts global events of the period 1962-1975, including inflation of the military-industrial complex, Cuban missile crisis, assassination of President Kennedy, and Vietnam War. Reckless actions by US military and political leaders are revealed, actions that come within a hair's breadth of causing America's destruction. Jack's adventures unfold in a curious collection of settings-Astro Dynamics, Vandenberg Air Force Base, Bicycle Bill's card room, Sandstone Ranch, Credit Suisse, Atascadero Mental Hospital, Black's Beach, Lester's karate gym, and the Body Shop. These are (or were at the time) real places, accurately depicted by an author-witness who was there. The narrative also feeds on known CIA programs that have since been disclosed either in official congressional investigations or as a consequence of the US Freedom of Information Act. Further disclosures continue to this day, but they are forcibly resisted by entrenched interests. In Operation Mockingbird leading American journalists were (and perhaps still are) paid secretly to promote the CIA's views in the mainstream media. The FBI's unconstitutional actions of CONTELPRO under J. Edgar Hoover against Vietnam War protestors provide another part of the story line.
