Alex Charns, Author of Queer Justice
Good books take you to places you’ve never been as well as to places you’ve forgotten you’ve been. John Yewell did that for me. He took me 50 years back in time to the California coast when I was flying down US 1 on a motorcycle. Thank you, John, for The Botsworth Dossier. Sometimes a newspaper is a book in disguise. I'm looking forward to exploring the world you've created.
When a novel tells a great story and lets me relive my college days at Cal Berkeley and hiking trips to Yosemite, well, that's a novel that is close to my heart. John Yewell's The Botsworth Dossier not only does that but its plot investigating white supremacists, touches on the 1979 Greensboro Massacre of five protesters by Klansmen and Nazis. Those killings happened during my first year of law school in Chapel Hill and were pivotal in my political development. The novel has been like a time machine for me. As the son of a mother whose family waged an underground battle against the Nazis in Poland during WWII, KKK and American Nazi activity in NC has always been a trigger for me, making me hypervigilant and wary. My poor mother - who watched the Gestapo and SS arrest her father for treason against the Third Reich in 1942 - saw the killings on the TV news. She called me from Michigan hysterical that the Nazis were going to kill me. She begged me to come home.
