[Imc-newsroom] Chicago press to release Iowan's anti-prison novel

[Mike Palecek]

Hello.

In September Mike Palecek's newest book will be released by New Leaf Books
of Chicago.

Book description:

"The Last Liberal Outlaw" depicts the dissidents in a small Iowa town versus
the coffee shop crowd in a life and death struggle that could have been
taken from today's Atlantic News-Telegraph, Diagonal Progress, or Story City
Herald, if one were to read between the lines.

Tom Blue is a newspaper editor who wants to do the right thing. He is
willing to fight the local establishment to oppose the building of a federal
prison near town, something which he sees as wrong. So often small town
journalists in America, even big town ones, do not care so much about what
is right, but what is profitable.

However, there are still those out there fighting the good fight. One of
them is Tom Blue, in little Liberal, Iowa.

Come along and see Tom face down the Chamber of Commerce, the bank, the city
council and even his own boss, in the middle of Main Street, with a
Macintosh, at noon.

------

Palecek lives in Sheldon, Iowa with his wife Ruth and two kids. Mike is a
former federal prisoner for peace, newspaper reporter, and was the Iowa
Democratic Party's nominee for the U.S. House in the Fifth Distict, 2000
election.

------

To contact New Leaf publisher Teresa Basille: tbasile at newleafbooks.net.
To contact Mike Palecek: mpalecek at rconnect.com

More Palecek books: www.iowapeace.com.

---------

Excerpt from "The Last Liberal Outlaw":

"Having lived in the area most of his life, Tom knew that in northwest Iowa,
handmade boards and signs rented from U-Haul dot the highways: Are You a
Slave to Alcohol?; If Your Bible is in Good Shape, You Probably Aren¹t; God
Bless America.

"But pockets of cynical populists also inhabit the back country, waiting.
They do not put messages on their lawns. They send joke suggestions to
Garrison Keillor and review new fiction for the New Yorker. Their
grandfathers loved Eugene Debs and Robert La Follette and learned to
despise Woodrow Wilson. Their grandmothers admired Dorothy Day and Jeannette
Rankin. And they learned at their knees about a day when life was hands-on:
when people read and cared about what was happening, and followed the deeds
of national leaders as if they were sitting at the weekly sales barn auction
or reading the minutes of the local school board meeting or coop
association. 

"They followed Jack Reed and his fascination with the Russian revolution.
They rooted for Marshalltown¹s Jean Seberg, hoping the government would
leave her alone. It angered them when they read that she had died.

"They go to the church meetings and school plays realizing they enter and
exit always slightly out of step with their neighbors.

"At election time they enter the middle school gym with seed corn caps in
hand, write-in their wildest hopes, then go home to milk, leaving the radio
on into the night. They mow their lawns, scoop their walks‹looking up every
now and again at the sound of the city snowplow scraping, listening for the
revolution."


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