Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
A Novel You’ll Love: Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys
So one of my friends is a novelist, Bill Rivers, or rather he’s a young man with a career in D.C. who’s written a novel about kids growing up in Pennsylvania in ’68, getting involved in one way and another in the turmoil of America at that time. It’s a good summer read and I am looking forward to reviewing it. Buy it, read it, you’ll thank me and you’ll be happy to help a young conservative who puts his talent to work our side seldom rewards (link to Amazon). Well, I’m writing now because Bill and I met today, we walked around Capitol Hill and I asked him about himself, thinking about how I might introduce him on a show or in a review and his life story is too earnest to be believable; the phrase, I believe, is all-American.
Let me just give you the quick official bio about his work: “Bill Rivers grew up along the creeks of the Brandywine Valley in Delaware and Pennsylvania. A graduate of the University of Delaware, he earned an MPA from the University of Pennsylvania as a Truman Scholar, one of sixty national awards given annually for a career in public service. Bill worked in the US Senate before serving as speechwriter for US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, developing classified and unclassified messages on national security and traveling throughout Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. He and his family live outside Washington, DC, where he still keeps a piece of a crashed fighter jet they found in the hills of southeastern Pennsylvania.”
Published in Literature
You can read and/or listen to it free if you have Kindle Unlimited.
I refuse to sign up for Kindle Unlimited, no matter how much Amazon tries to push me into it. I do buy a lot of Kindle books, though.
Why ?
There is no legal or moral obligation to sign up for Kindle Unlimited, but it gets me many more books than I could afford to buy. In terms of privacy, that was gone the first time I bought a Kindle book, so I can’t see how Unlimited makes it seriously worse.
Yeah, I’m glad to say, it’s also got the audiobook version &, indeed, you can get it for free.
If you enjoy the novel, do buy it & maybe give it to someone–it’s worth helping a young conservative artist!
It might be a fine novel, and Bill is probably a heck of a guy, but is “MPA … Truman scholar … Mattis … messaging” really the way to appeal to the Ricochet crowd?
Thank you – great idea ! I was one of those kids who grew up in Pennsylvania in the 60’s. I’d love to read it and support a fellow conservative. I’ll hurry and get it, then I can send it to my sister for her birthday in July!
Nobody’s perfect….
I prefer to “own” books in some fashion so I have them downloaded to my device and can access them at any time to use for reference. To tell the truth, I’m not quite sure what the subscription model does to the note-taking and note-keeping capabilities of Kindle, but those are very important to me, as is the ability to go back and use books as a searchable reference. Sometimes I buy both the hardcover and the kindle version of a book, or both the audio and kindle version, so I can quickly look things up. Amazon has in the last few years degraded the note-taking and note-keeping capabilities somewhat, but I noticed recently that some of the capabilities are back.
Part of the problem is my general dislike of the “contentification” of both audio and text. Amazon keeps trying to migrate their audible.com model from its emphasis on books to an emphasis on “content,” and this notion of Kindle Unlimited seems to be a part of that. Amazon uses terminology like “your next listen” or “your next read.” I abhor that. I want books, not content. I want information, not a listening experience or a reading experience. Books are expensive and time-consuming to produce. Content is cheaper, so there is more potential for Amazon to make money with it, so I can see why it is de-emphasizing the notion of books. But if it doesn’t like the book business and thinks it is cramping its style, I wish it would sell Audible and Kindle to some company that does like it.
I think it speaks to youthful idealism, to say nothing of honesty. I’m not sure how appealing these qualities are, here or elsewhere…
Help the young man out–he actually has a chance to make a noise, he’s already got more than 4k reviews on Amazon, largely raves. Again–young conservative novelist–good thing!