Barry Bergman reads from his new book, PROLES, in an event hosted by Book Passage for this event organized by the Left Coast Writers®
Saturday, November 8th — 2pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera ||
PROLES themes resonate today: Simon Bussbaum’s a film junkie without a cause, a spiritual drifter looking for light in a long-ago time of social tensions, cultural turmoil, political paranoia, and criminal conspiracies in high places.
Inspired by a McCarthy-era reenactment of a triumphant miners’ strike–and freshly liberated from Nixon’s draft—he flees Queens for the Arizona desert, eager to join American workers’ march to the promised land of liberty and justice for all.
But his working-class hero’s journey veers wildly off-script. Instead of the “marvelous adventure” trumpeted by his new proletarian bedfellows, he tumbles headlong into a long, hot summer of hard labor, toxic masculinity, unrequited love, and unexpected insights into the power—and perils—of myth.
“A disturbingly topical tale about a young spiritual drifter (Simon Bussbaum), thrown in with a group of disenfranchised males brutalized by cultural, educational, personal, and political neglect. “Proles” refers, of course, to “proletariat” and that’s not the only connection to “1984”, Orwell’s brilliant and now-we-can-say prescient masterpiece.It’s something to read and consider …”
—Linda Watanabe McFerrin, author of Navigating the Divide and POST-Apocalyptic Valentine
“A vivid debut … a tough-minded meditation on politics, delusion, and survival in Nixon’s America. A gritty, darkly funny coming-of-age steeped in radicalism and copper dust.”
—California Magazine
Barry Bergman has been a newspaper reporter, a magazine writer/editor, and a communications pro at UC Berkeley and assorted Bay Area nonprofits. Before earning his journalism degree at San Francisco State University, he worked in a variety of industrial settings, including two years in an Arizona copper smelter, an experience he would reimagine, eventually, as the fictional background for Proles, his first completed novel.