At once brilliantly incisive and playful, this gripping story –with its carefree yet cutting style –takes us inside the life of its spirited narrator, Kenneth Flear, an acclaimed novelist and author of a landmark book on non-violent resistance, who is now happily ensconced within the tranquil, ivy-covered walls of a university. The undergraduates he is mentoring, inoculated with politics of the “war on terror” and prone to the allure of the corporate ladder, now appear, like Professor Flear, as models of conformity.

Enter the brilliant, provocative heroine of the story, Anne Miner, a graduating senior and granddaughter of a liberal seven-term U.S. senator. Anne invites Professor Flear to join her on campus protest to disinvite and otherwise prevent President George W. Bush from delivering the keynote at her 2005 commencement. Like the careerist student body, the complacent. Tenure-minded Flear declines to join Anne’s movement

When Anne single-handedly stops Bush’s address, delivering instead an incendiary rebuke of the President and the Iraq War, her triumph, tragically is at the cost of her own life. Badly shaken by Anne’s death, the vulnerable Flear turns mercenary, agreeing to write about the affair. At the point his forthcoming book appears predestined for the bestseller lists, Flare’s conscience begins to struggle against its status quo message: That Anne Miner was insane and that her actions had no political significance.

By the time Flear is scheduled to appear on a nationally televised celebrity-author panel, he is fully determined, with the support of the American bookselling community, to halt the publication. As Flear strives to rectify his betrayal of Anne Miner and her mission, Eliot Asinof delivers a powerful parting salvo in the battle for the soul of America by inviting us to contemplate the meaning of her sacrifice. 

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