Bøger af Jack Random

Lost in Her Soul is the fourth in Jack Random's Poetry Series. The title was inspired by a Ukrainian woman who spoke to a reporter after her city was destroyed by Russian missiles. Some of the poems in this collection are about war. Some are about growing up in an age of global warming. Others are concerned with the state of democracy in America and the world. Still others are simply about life at the beginning of the 21st century. What connects all of the poems (there are about 275 of them) is that they were written with the intent to move the reader, to touch the heart, to stir the emotions, in the hope that by doing so they will affect positive change in the world.

A collection of plays surrounding a theme of faith: A futuristic Joan of Arc leads an underground society to revolt (D'Arc Underground), a cynical writer contests the meaning of life (Fosdick & Muldoon), Hollywood legends struggle to accept the lessons of life in an afterlife waystation on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Nighthawks Cafe), the ghost of Geronimo tests the characters of a mixed breed Apache couple (Geronimo's Revenge) and a man with a difficult past stumbles into a bar where he attempts to save a woman who has reached her limits (Queen of the Lonely Hearts). These plays are about individuals finding hope and recovering faith in a world that has constantly and relentlessly beaten them down.

Pursued by the mob and the law, a wild woman in a 1967 Dodge convertible picks up a hitchhiker somewhere outside of Bakersfield - perhaps on the same lonely road where James Dean met his fate fifty years earlier. So begins the adventures of Jake Jones and Ruby Daulton, the most formidable couple since Lula and Sailor in Barry Gifford's Wild at Heart. Written in twenty-seven cinematic scenes, complete with its own soundtrack, they embark on a cross-country adventure filled with intrigue, mysticism and danger. Confronting sex-crazed bikers, forces of nature, the wrath of an angry mob boss and the betrayal of friends, they survive by reading the signs and exploiting their special talents until the King of the New Orleans underground, driven by his infatuation with Ruby, captures and transports her to the Big Easy on the Mississippi Riverboat Queen. Formerly employed as a stripper and drug-runner for the mob, Ruby is in fact a torch singer of extraordinary talent. Though kept locked away in a drug-induced haze she is allowed to sing in Pale Louie's underground club and quickly captures the heart of New Orleans. Afflicted with a sleeping disorder that lays him out for days at a time, Jake is not one to give up without a fight. He possesses Kachina magic and employs all his skills in a concerted effort to rescue Ruby from captivity. Armed with a bundle of cash won in a poker game, he makes allies in the underground and wins the respect of Louie's most trusted servant. With the help of his friends he stages an improbable rescue and seeks refuge in a safe house in the lower ninth ward. It is the summer of 2005, America is engaged in multiple wars and a storm named Katrina has her own date with destiny in New Orleans. Rain pounding and wind howling with the rage of a hurricane, a determined Louie tracks Jake and Ruby down just as the levees give way. Pale Louie is swept away into the swampy waters of Lake Pontchartrain where dozens if not hundreds of his past victims are rumored to await him. Jake and Ruby must finally survive the ravages of Katrina and its devastating aftermath. After all the challenges, the dangers and hardships, not only on their journey but throughout their young lives, they will not back down. "Nothing could stop them. They had the magic of destiny and the medicine of the crow. They were a force of nature, undeniable and pure. Like Bonnie and Clyde, Cisco and Poncho, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, they were bound for glory on the road of adventure and nothing but nothing could stand in their way!"

In this third and final installment of the Chess Series billionaires William Bates and Solana Rothschild are determined to enact a real world chess match with the ultimate goal of taking down Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. They recruit chess master Garry Kasparov as consultant and prepare the board by placing agents with critical agencies and organizations: Interpol, the International Court of Justice, Russian intelligence, European financial institutions, the Bank of Cypress, Deutsche Bank and the Russian mob. Chief Inspector Jean Mogherini of Interpol emerges as the protagonist of the story. His grim determination, deductive intuition and investigative skill leads a team of attorneys, rebels, mobsters, detectives, assassins, spies and hackers on a path that will ultimately reveal the truth beneath the truth. The question is: Will Vladimir Putin survive the onslaught or will he have his bloody revenge? Pawns to Players offers a poignant metaphor for today's political and economic realities: There are forces at play that control our daily lives beyond our reckoning. From Chapter 21: It was more than chess now. It was real. It was life. It was as if all those conspiracy theories about the elite controlling the masses like a puppet master had been transformed into flesh and blood reality. Men like Putin and Medvedev loved to control the lives and fortunes of ordinary men and women. Now it was their turn to be manipulated and controlled. Now it was their turn to wonder why the gods had turned against them. Little did they suspect that forces greater than themselves were operating in the field of play. Hopefully they would never know.

Using a complex system of shadows and operators, Solana Rothschild and William Bates translate a chess match to real-world events to determine who will become the next president: Secretary of State Shelby Duran or New York billionaire Daniel J. Wynn.

With the Supreme Court decision that overturned an election and handed George W. Bush the presidency, Jack Random adjusted his focus from fiction to political commentaries. The first volume of the Jazzman Chronicles was an indictment of the two-party system, a system designed to serve the elite by negating the power of the people. It is a system paid for and controlled by corporate interests. It offers the appearance of choice but when both parties collect contributions from the same corrupt well, what choice do we really have? In the succeeding years, American democracy has become even more endangered with legislators conspiring to disenfranchise minorities and a Supreme Court defined by corporate bias. Meantime, confronted by the unspeakable tragedy of September 11, 2001, America committed its soldiers to the long and unwinnable wars of Afghanistan and Iraq. As the president attested, it was the day everything changed. For dissidents like Jack Random it meant that all other issues had to yield to a single cause: opposing the wars. The second volume (The War Chronicles) was issued before the invasion of Afghanistan and before Shock and Awe hit Baghdad and place America on a permanent war setting. With the expressed purpose of stopping the wars before they happened, he methodically destroys the Bush administration's case for war. War would dominate American politics for the next decade but Random found his voice on a wide range of issues and a platform on the worldwide web. This collection includes a small sample of his political writings, gathered under the following headings: I. CORE PRINCIPLES: An indictment of the major party system. II. THE WAR CHRONICLES: The case against war in Iraq and Afghanistan. III. THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT: The continuing struggle to end the wars. IV. ECONOMICS: An attack on deregulation, free trade, austerity policies and anti-labor measures. V. SUPREME INJUSTICE: The perpetual train wreck of a corporate court. VI. EDUCATION: The drive to privatize public education. VII. MEDIA & PROPAGANDA: An indictment of the corporate media. VIII.THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE: Environmental and manmade disasters become commonplace while our preparedness lags behind. IX. IMMIGRATION & DISCRIMINATION: The myth of equality and the racism underlying the anti-immigrant movement. X. ON DEMOCRACY: The erosion of democracy and how to restore it. Taken together, the Jazzman Chronicles represent a contemporary history of American politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

A global economic collapse has triggered a breakdown in the social order. The grid has failed. There is no Internet, no television or radio. Schools, banks, hospitals, prisons and businesses close down. Government services, police and firefighters, are stripped down to a bare minimum. Property rights have given way to squatter's rights. There are no jobs and no money. People work for food and gas rations. Millions are homeless. People gather in parks, public buildings and under bridges for shelter. Gardens spring up wherever water and soil are available. Against this backdrop, a father faces the hardest decision of his life. Dear Madge, Denim and Charlie: These are hard times and we are all going to have to make sacrifices. I never would have thought that giving up and moving out could be an act of kindness but here we are. We don't have enough room and I take more than my share. We don't have enough food and I need too much just to keep going. The time has come for me to make a hard choice and I've finally made it. The best thing I can do for my family and loved ones right now is to go away... I don't know how long it will take or what I'll have to do to survive out there but I'll come back when it's all over and times are better. When that time comes I hope you'll understand what I did and why. Your loving husband and father, Stone. Hard Times is the story of an ordinary man and his family in extraordinary times. Stone loses his job, his home and his identity as a father and husband. Swallowing his pride they are forced to move in with his wife's elderly mother. When other family members join them there is neither enough room nor food. Stone faces a dilemma: Would the family be better off without him? His decision to leave leads him to a life on the road where he learns about himself and his fellow beings. Borrowing conceptually from Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Akutagawa's Rashomon and Aldous Huxley's Island, Hard Times is about hope and overcoming hardship.

In 1993 the author and his friend Wiz embark on a seminal journey in a 1965 Mustang that takes them from Nashville, Tennessee, to Modesto, California, and back again. Determined to explore the land and its people, to perform jazz poetry on the streets and to hit a sacred shot into Grand Canyon, they remain open to whatever adventures await them. Leaving the past behind they clear their minds to take in the lessons of the journey. Each round of golf and each encounter with the land, its history and its people seems to offer a message that applies equally to their lives, their relationships and the game they love. A family of white supremacists on the Texas panhandle offers a fair deal on a spare tire. A wild man on the streets of Albuquerque terrorizes the poetry crowd. Grand Canyon inspires shots into the infinite void. Don Juan has a laugh as they play three rounds on the road in Utah. Suicide rabbits dive beneath their wheels on the loneliest road in America. They find solace at a family reunion in the high Sierras of Graeagle. They explore small town America in central California and escape the shadow of death. They play golf in the kingdom at Pacific Grove. They are stranded on the path of a killer in Yosemite National Park and witness a sky of a million stars at Sonora Pass. They are enchanted by the dance of Esmeralda on the streets of Boulder, Colorado, and are lured by sweet temptations that would alter their destinies. From the vast open plains to barren wastelands, from the Great Rocky Mountains to the High Sierras, from Grand Canyon to the magnificence of Yosemite, from the Mississippi to the Pacific coast, they collect memories, stories and lessons that will last a lifetime and enable them to adapt and overcome the problems that await their arrival home. The Grand Canyon Zen Golf Tour captures a time in the recent past when America was full of promise and its people were searching for meaning in art, poetry, music and spirituality - even in the royal and ancient game of golf. This edition also includes eighteen lessons from The Handbook of Zen Golf.

Roman Mason was born to change the world. Deeply disturbed by the state of American politics, he emerges from isolation to assemble his team of loyal activists and announces a new mission. Convinced that American democracy cannot survive without a fundamental restructuring of the political system, they build an independent movement from the ground up, uniting libertarians on the right and progressives on the left. They establish a network of community centers dedicated to helping those forgotten by a system where the dominant parties cater to the needs and desires of the elite. The growing movement attracts new members, including a clandestine antiwar organization dedicated to helping dissenters and deserting soldiers to escape persecution or imprisonment by taking a new identity and relocating. Political mastermind John Sinclair, charged with orchestrating congressional campaigns, uncovers a scandal with the power to rock both parties to their roots. Upon his death, operative Simon Juneau left behind a file documenting widespread corruption at the highest levels of public office. As momentum builds the movement comes under attack and Mason discovers that Homeland Security is behind the campaign. Several members of the core group are abducted and detained without legal recourse. Rome escapes to Canada and applies for political asylum. The movement releases the Juneau file along with a detailed account of the purge, leading to congressional hearings, widespread indictments and full vindication. Rome emerges as an American hero but soon finds his organization once again under attack. Disbanding the core group, he receives an invitation to a meeting of elites at Hohenzollern Castle in Germany. He recruits the hacker group Anonymous and with his old friend, Sinclair, determines to expose the world's most powerful and corrupting organization. In the tradition of grand conspiracy novels, A Patriot Dirge will leave you exhausted and yearning for more.

Mourning the loss of his loved one, Jerico Whitehorse, a young Native American leaves the reservation to cry for a vision. He soon finds himself in a life and death struggle with the eternal enemy of his people. His vision informs him that he must experience the seven sacred rites of the Lakota to gather the strength he needs to defeat the Wasichu. As he fulfills his vision he embarks on a journey that summons the four hundred year history of the conflict between the indigenous tribes of North America and the European invaders. He walks with the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears. He engages the Apache followers of Geronimo. He bears witness at the Sand Creek Massacre. He rides with his fellow warriors at Little Big Horn. He leads the Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee. Wounded and dying in a North Dakota hospital, he visits the overworld and discovers the essential truth: He carries the soul of the most famous of all Lakota leaders. He is Crazy Horse. That is why the killing spirit must defeat him above all others. The Wasichu takes many forms from the Black Robes who attempted to steal Indian souls and initiated genocide with diseased blankets, from the preacher turned soldier Colonel John Chivington who led his Colorado volunteers to the slaughter of peaceful Cheyenne at Sand Creek, from General George Armstrong Custer who led the massacre at the Washita River before meeting his destiny at Little Big Horn, from Columbus and Hernando Cortez to the more contemporary killers of native peoples: Johnson, Nixon and Kissinger. It all comes to a head at Wounded Knee, where the Wasichu strikes a mortal blow to Jerico's grandfather. He completes the seven rites with the keeping and the releasing of the soul.

Welcome to Jazztown where all men and women are artists in search of their souls. The gutter is the great equalizer and no one is beyond the reach of her pull. A trumpet player coaxes nirvana from his battered horn, a torch singer finds the core, a dancer touches the heart of a heartless man, a leather goddess roams the underbelly, a poet falls in love and all our dreams are realized ... for better or for worse. The stories, poems and images in this collection date back to 1996-97 when Random Erotica and Tales from Jazztown were published in handbook form. Asked for his comments, noted poet-musician-artist Jake Berry wrote: "There be saints of the native soil here, and Christ what a story: Our visionary slashed by seductive wench, our souls abandoned in timeless cinema of souls - all soul's night howling at me from the page!" America's Intercultural Magazine (AIM) originally published Burning Churches. Lynx Eye published Wild Man of Albuquerque and Fatal Flaw. The Trumpet Player and The Torch Singer were published in Mobius.

What begins with an investigation into the suspicious death of a Seattle businessman soon reveals a century old organization bent on global economic domination. Guided by an ancient Indian spirit, Rome Mason answers the call and organizes a team to expose and destroy the nefarious Sanctum. With all the twists and turns of a traditional conspiracy novel, Ghost Dance offers a spiritual element that transcends the genre and forms a bridge to magic realism.

A collection of stories, poems and visions centered on the culture and experience of Native Americans. The collection dates to 1996 when Desert Dreams was published as a handbook and 1997 when Apache Pilgrim was published in the same format. Soar on the wings of the canyon crow, behold the white buffalo, share the Ghost Dance with Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, hear the ancient prophecies, visit the Paiute prophet Wavoka, go on pilgrimage to Wounded Knee, watch the desert transformed to a spirit world through the eyes of the crow, the coyote, the wolf, the lizard and the snake. When Desert Dreams found its way to Long Standing Bear Chief in Montana, he wrote: "Let's get beyond the anger of mourning. Is there another way for us to get justice? I think so. Bring the whites to our way of belief and prayer." While the author did not fully appreciate his comments then, he has come to embrace them and hopes the sentiment is alive in this collection. The story Ghost Dance was originally published in Liquid Ohio and The Killing Spirit in the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. Mitakuye Oyasin.

The second volume of plays by Jack Random, the plays in this collection date from the early to mid eighties and reflect varied interests and stages of personal development. The young romantic (Nashville Round, Aphrodite House) is definitely here as is the profound influence of Joseph Campbell (Heroes, Ringed Women of the Forbidden Forest). The collection also reflects a transition to political activism (Scenarios) and a regard for American history (Reason's Reckoning). NASHVILLE ROUND: Singers and songwriters struggle to balance artistic and financial needs in Nashville, Tennessee. "Where fools reign supreme and tears are miracles of light; in the shadows of the chosen ones...on the streets of Nashville." HEROES: A couple rediscovers the heroes within in the company of spirits at an abandoned tavern. "If you look beyond the sorrow you see hope and love and greatness." RINGED WOMEN: A prince must survive seven trials to reach the Ringed Women and unite a divided land. "I beheld the illumination of darkness and a trinity of ancient goddesess, the Ringed Women of Earth, Air and Water." APHRODITE HOUSE: A dreamer learns the lessons of love at a house dominated by the spirit of woman. "Only a house but such a house that like the brilliant red moon in the eyes of a dreamer holds forth a sacred promise and beckons." SCENARIOS: A reporter pursues a story concerning 9-11 with a rogue CIA analyst. "We took situations and events to create scenarios. We ran them to their logical conclusions." REASON'S RECKONING: Tom Paine recalls the events of his life. "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." These are plays that reflect the life and times of their author. Written with a knowledge of the practical limitations of the stage, they are at once ambitious and simple. They were written with laughter and tears and the hope that future audiences will be compelled to think and feel as the author felt.

Life Songs is a collection of over three hundred poems reflecting the author's outlook, philosophy and values as an artist, a writer, a poet and a human being. They are personal poems. They are mirrors to the world through the lens of poetry. They do not aspire (as the writer's other works have) to change the reader's heart or mind. They simply reflect the poet's reality over his decades of existence. These poems contain a great affection and empathy for others within and without the poet's life. As he states in the introduction: "For though I despise cruelty and injustice I have always believed that humans are in their essence good and kind. It is only when the indignities of life alter the fundamentals of the self that humans tend to do heartless things." Life Songs also reflect the poet's great love of nature and an overriding respect for art and artists. "Poetry has long been like a secret love for which I never had enough time." In this work, after decades devoted to plays, novels and political essays, Jack Random made the time in the hope that readers may find in it some joy and inspiration.