Blinded by Greed
by Donnie King
$12.95, softcover, 168 pages
Published: August 2006
ISBN 1-59715-033-9

To order call 866-942-8389

What is "patriotism" and who is the patriot in modern America? What role does greed play in decisions of state? These questions are asked in Donnie King’s novel Blinded by Greed. In this modern morality play, the responsibilities of the common man hit home under the growing darkness of unlimited presidential powers and public indifference.

Jack and Susan Stilman are working class people living through the paranoia of post-911 America. But who is the paranoid? Is it Jack’s government, which will stop at nothing to realize its greedy ambitions, all in the name of "national security"? Or is the paranoid Jack, an out-of-work auto body repairman who has plenty to worry about. Smart and well-informed, Jack begins to question his government’s appetite for war, its disregard for the elderly, and its indifference toward the working class. More important, he begins to question the motives of the men and women who are really running things. (And who are these men and women?)

As his world is turned upside down, Jack exercises his right to protest by penning letters to Washington dignitaries. Everywhere he turns, he finds himself asking the questions that his friends, even his wife, are afraid to ask. A series of coincidences and some new friends in his and Susan’s lives raise the possibility of retaliation, but by whom? The Stilman’s upwardly mobile friends draw them, especially Susan, into a hedonistic lifestyle that would sedate away national and international worries in a hero less self-reliant than Jack. Even when he and his New Age buddies are out catching big fish and guzzling beer on the Atlantic, Jack can’t get his mind off his theories and the possible terrors of the future.

Is this a book about a New McCarthyism? Unlike the Red Scare of the 1950s, this more sinister enemy is tailored for the computer age. And unlike its predecessor, it targets the average working stiff whose defiance just might cost him everything.