Michael Alan Heller

As a young man at West Point, the author found himself in a hostile environment, struggling to fit in where he was learning that he did not belong, searching for something to hold onto that was true and that nurtured his spirit. Now, from the wisdom and experience of greater years, he reflects on his painful and sometimes lonely passage and on how way opened for him to discover himself and his place in the world. He tells his story with insight and compassion for the variety of people who crossed his path. Here is a perpetual theme in the journals of Friends’ search for harmony between one’s inward life and one’s place in the outer world.… (meer)

Ed Hawkins lives in the small, seaside Southern California town of Laredo and has worked at and been fired or quit just about every manual labor job available. He's a rotten person, and some of that can be blamed on the fact that he had his lower jaw blown off in the war and now has to wear a piece of plastic with fake teeth. His wife and ten year old are as nervous around him as everyone else. When he's hauled into the police station, Ed happens to see a police bulletin that says a local bigwig had just been arrested for suspected child molestation but released. That's when Ed decides to try his hand at blackmail.
Published in 1957, it's an unusual story in several ways, for addressing child predators, for Ed's bizarre reaction when he believes his own son is in danger, and for the convoluted ending. It also has a Japanese-American police sergeant whose in charge of the local police force, a very rare character for 1957. For much of the book Ed Hawkins is a grim wanna-be sociopath, and then suddenly he isn't.… (meer)