Bücher von Jim Lynch

Democracy by its very nature is a difficult form of government to administer. It is messy. There are many conflicting ideas of how to do things. In order to enact any programs, you must build consensus. There is a lot of give-and-take in the process. In the end few people get everything they want. The democratic process is further complicated by the elected officials who are supposed to administer it. They are not perfect people. They wrestle with the same foibles as all of us. They are easily distracted, are inconsistent, lack the proper knowledge, and in some cases are just downright incompetent. Plus, they possess some of our common moral weaknesses: pride, envy, jealousy, laziness, just to name a few. So in the end American democracy will never be perfect. The best we can hope for is that we can make it better. This should be our ambition and our goal. This is the story of one individual who entered the political arena. It tells what he tried to accomplish, and what he learned.

Following The Highest Tide, Border Songs, and Truth Like the Sun, Jim Lynch now gives us a grand and idiosyncratic family saga that will stand alongside Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion.Joshua Johannssen has spent all of his life surrounded by sailboats. His grandfather designed them, his father built and raced them, his Einstein-obsessed mother knows why and how they work (or not). For Josh and his two siblings, their backyard was the Puget Sound and sailing their DNA. But both his sister and brother fled many years ago: Ruby to Africa and elsewhere to do good works on land, and Bernard to god-knows-where at sea, a fugitive and pirate. Suddenly thirty-one, Joshwho repairs boats of all kinds in a Steinbeckian marina south of Seattleis pained and confused by whatever the hell went wrong with his volatile family. His parents are barely speaking, his mystified grandfather is drinking harder, and he himselfdespite an endless and comic flurry of online dateshasn't even come close to finding a girlfriend. But when the Johannssens unexpectedly reunite for the most important race in these watersall of them together on a classic vessel they made decades agothey will be carried to destinies both individual and collective, and to a heart-shattering revelation. Past and present merge seamlessly and collide surprisingly as Jim Lynch reveals a family unlike any other, with the grace and humor and magic of a master storyteller.