Alex Charns, Author of Queer Justice
I’m grateful for John Yewell. John is a visionary writer. He’s written an important novel, a warning to America. Our leaders are so wrapped up in divisive politics that the extreme haters, the white America firsters have gained scary leverage in the houses of power.
It used to be that a white peoples party would be seen for what it was, a racist hornet’s nest. Not anymore. John’s characters, and his novel, graph the rise of government for and by hate from its resurgence in 1979 in Greensboro, NC to the halls of power more recently.
I recommend folks read The Botsworth Dossier. Not just to scare us out of our complacency to get us to rise and fight back. The writing is very good. His motorcycle scenes won me over early. John writes about California like the native that he is. The Monterey Coast comes alive as does Yosemite. And there’s the love interest.
John is veteran journalist. This book isn’t his first rodeo. I suspect the manuscript is seasoned with his sweat and tears of a long journey. Don’t be concerned that the novel is a very large newspaper. It’s fun to read. Yes, fun.
Thank you, John. Hot off the presses.
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.
There goes "The Botsworth Dossier" and time travel. Carol in the novel says, "Ronald Reagan scared the shit out of her . . ." Yes, that's how I felt despite my beloved uncle who survived imprisonment and torture by the Nazis in WWII poised for a presidential appointment if Reagan won. Compared to the Republican Party of today, Reagan was a progressive. He saw the danger of the Soviets. He treated his adversaries with a modicum of respect. How could I be so wrong? Or is the Reagan comparison to Trump like weighing the atmosphere on Mars to that on Saturn? It's meaningless. One can't breathe either one. I read on. The white supremacists heckle me from the pages ahead in the novel.
John Yewell, I’m jealous of your novel The Botsworth Dossier. Why?
You wrote the novel I didn’t have the vision to write. It’s also a novel that is focused on white supremacists, racists, KKK, American Nazis and the intersection of the crazy world we live in today.
I’ve been obsessed with Nazis since I found the Holocaust in my basement when I was six years old. For me, it was the picture section of my grandfather Alexander P. Gwiazdowski’s book I Survived Hitler’s Hell. The pretty little girl, about my age, atop of pile of bodies. That image is burned into my grieving soul.
So, what do I write? I wrote a memoir Listening to Chopin While Fighting Nazis about my family’s imprisonment, enslavement, and torture after working in the Polish Home Army and smuggling their Jewish neighbors into nearby Lithuania. Just this week, I finished Twenty Angels on Her Roof. It’s a fictional version of my mom’s wartime life. The style is a Vonnegut and Narnia magical realism mashup with characters including the Black Madonna, Baby Jesus, a golem like wanderer called Tortuga, twenty Jewish guardian angels, and King and Queen crow. This celestial cast joins my mother, Basia, 12-years-old to fight the Nazis.
And, John, I tip my Detroit Tigers cap to you, sir. Well, done. How do we save America? Study history and order his book right now.