It’s been a long time in coming but today, July 14, is launch date for my memoir, Thumbs Up: Memoir of a Joyful Organizer. On behalf of my publisher, Azenphony Press, I invite you to celebrate with us at my book launch party.
Third Mind Books, 118 E. Washington Street, in Ann Arbor, is playing host. Party begins at 7 p.m.
I Offer My Beat Credentials
This is my first time speaking at Third Mind Books. I’m especially honored because they specialize in literature of the Beats. To get the invitation, I had to prove my Beat credentials.
How did I do that? Come to the book launch and find out my personal connections to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, Paul Krassner, and other literary legends.
As historian Harvey Wasserman notes in his foreword, Thumbs Up “spins a Kerouac-worthy tale of an adventure-filled life well spent.”
Then we’ll celebrate with a cake that is a spitting image of the book cover but tastes better.
Bonus: With every book you buy, Third Mind will give you a free copy of my first book, Beercans on the Side of the Road: The Story of Henry the Hitchhiker. While supplies last.
Thumbs Up
Thumbs Up: Memoir of a Joyful Organizer is my memoir about the milestone events I witnessed and provoked and that shaped my life from Kent State into the new millennium.
It includes all three phases of my life with the underground press: when I was on it, when I preserved its legacy in print through Voices from the Underground, and when we went digital with Independent Voices. But it includes a lot more. Here’s how it is described:
“The author’s journey through the seventies and beyond with the underground press, the Yippies and Zippies, his thumb, his Judaism, organic catering, community organizing, emerging technology, and Emily. A funny, insightful, always hopeful memoir of a joyful writer, editor, dishwasher, Zen phony, and legendary historian of the underground press.”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz called Thumbs Up “a gift, a cultural outbreak of joy in the dark time of the 1970s for our own dark time.”
Kirkus Reviews called it “An open and funny account that spans decades with joy and passion.”
Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia called Thumbs Up “an important book because it straightens out a history that has been deliberately twisted in the telling, and hopefully it will open a lot of eyes to what really happened in the Sixties, and even more urgently needs to happen again in America.”
I look forward to seeing you tonight at Third Mind Books. If you can’t make it, go ahead and order the book here.
Ken
