Kirkus Review of License to Ill

When you self-publish a novel, you want to find ways to lend credibility to it, a way to say the book is worth reading. One way to do that is to have a reputable agency review it. Kirkus is a pretty respected reviewer. Here's what they had to say about License to Ill. I think it's pretty accurate.

Two lawyers attempt to overturn Obamacare on spiritual grounds in this debut novel.

Jerry Riggs is chief counsel to the speaker of the House and, as a Republican, is exasperated with his party’s failure to effectively oppose Obamacare. He’s especially angry at the GOP’s hypocritical complicity: Senate Minority Leader Mack McCormick openly criticized the Affordable Health Care Act but simultaneously ensured its protection from legislative assault in deference to his close ties to the health care industry. But an unusual opportunity to attack Obamacare surfaces when Sebastian Vogel, an old law school classmate of Jerry’s, files a suit against the federal government, requesting a religious exemption from the act’s individual mandate. His argument is a strikingly odd one, not premised on any adherence to institutional religion but instead on a general spirituality that interprets sickness and health as states of consciousness rather than medical conditions: “We’ve mapped out the DNA and found that it doesn’t explain everything….Could that be because there’s a spiritual aspect to disease?” Jerry reluctantly teams up with Vogel—his New-Age conversion strikes the chief counsel as incoherent at first—because he sees a real possibility to strike a blow at an otherwise impregnable law. But when Vogel’s home is set on fire by an arsonist, the stakes become perilously clear—a billion-dollar industry has taken notice and is prepared to kill to protect its profits. Meanwhile, Jerry struggles with his own mounting health problems—overweight and underexercised, he’s developed a serious heart condition that requires surgery, precisely the circumstances that led to his father’s death. Wright inventively combines political intrigue, humor, and philosophical meditation in an unusually policy-wonkish thriller. The author certainly stretches the outer limits of plausibility—and readers’ credulity—but in a way artful enough that the plot never descends into outright absurdity. Vogel’s form of spirituality can be irksomely enigmatic, but he still delivers some memorable insights. The whole narrative is a kind of conservative fantasy—a spiritually inspired but legitimate way to topple Obamacare—so it’s possible those readers unsympathetic to the Republican cause will find it tough to be sensitive to Jerry’s plight.

A witty and refreshingly original political drama.

Blurb for License to Ill

I need to bring you up to speed on some of the developments concerning my latest novel, License to Ill (see cover/link to the right). Both License to Ill and The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder (look to the right) are novels that uses an entertaining story to convey spiritual principles.

I imposed upon my friend Roger Johns, author of an excellent mystery set in Baton Rouge, LA, called Dark River Rising (St. Martin’s Press-Minotaur Books), to read License to Ill and write a "blurb" for it, which he graciously agreed to do. A blurb is a quote from another author that usually goes on the cover or somewhere on the interior to help get people excited about reading the novel.

Here's what Roger wrote for me:

Big money, political intrigue, a very inventive story with plenty of action, and characters you won’t soon forget make License to Ill a flat out page-turner.

 Thanks, Roger! I'll get the cover updated soon in order to get this blurb on there.

Your Car Can Be a Great Place to Meditatate . . .

. . . as long as you don't close your eyes.

If you have to deal with rush hour traffic or have a long commute everyday, use that time to your benefit. For heaven's sake, turn off the music--it's not bringing you peace, it's programming you--and turn off talk radio--it's designed to get you spun up.

Just because it's rush hour doesn't mean you have to be in a rush. Hang out in the slow lane. Let people in, let people pass you. It won't make an appreciable difference in your arrival time, but it will make an appreciable difference in your blood pressure and it will give you space to look inward instead of outward.

Pay attention to your breathing, one breath at a time. In, out, rest. Your breath is always happening now. This is the simplest of meditations. It brings you to the present moment very quickly and easily. And what problems do you ever have right now?

Good to Be Back!

It's been a few years since I've done any blogging as I made a few changes in my life, changing jobs, moving from Kentucky to Tennessee and now to the Washington DC area. I was also writing a 2nd novel (see to the right). Meditation and Life Coaching has continued with each new locale.

During this hiatus, I experimented with another blog format that just didn't work for me. It was too complicated. And so now I'm back.

It's good to be back! I'm going to try to post something uplifting for you every weekday, even if it's something simple like this.

The Münchhausen Trilemma

For a brief moment, my next novel, now called License to Ill, was going to be called The Obamacare Trilemma, and it was going to have the below inscription, both in German and English at the beginning. Even though I've changed the title, I'm going to keep the inscription because it's still very much apropos to the story and it sets the right tone because it's so funny (I think).

This may be the only place you can find the English translation of the Barron von Münchhausen bootstrapping story anywhere (see below), which is a little odd because the Münchhausen Trilemma is such an important philosophical issue.

For a more complete understanding of the concept, I invite you to click on the link and read, but for my purposes The MünchhausenTrilemma demonstrates that rationality (i.e. thinking) must have input from some source other than itself. Rationality is like a calculator in that it requires a finger from somewhere to press the buttons.

The input comes from consciousness. Rationality is but a tiny subset of our larger consciousness. Feelings bubble up into ideas (rationality) and those ideas become words for the very limited purposes of communication and the creation of labor-saving devices. Those feelings come from our connectedness to all that is, not from our own thinking.

That's why a so-called "rational" approach to life (as opposed to a consciousness-based approach to life) is considered bootstrapping. It does not allow for this input from all that is. It simply assumes that the thinking started up on its own. That the calculator pressed its own buttons.

[As always, you need not take my word for any of this. Go into your body and make your own determination as to the nature of reality.]
The world of Science (what I would call the Religion of Science) would have you ignore this point. As stated aptly on Rationalwiki.org:

The Münchhausen Trilemma is a problem in philosophy that all statements can be questioned and then need evidence. This problem has been well known in philosophy for thousands of years, but rarely gets addressed because it breaks the legs of philosophy, science, and any other possible approach to reality.

I would disagree, however, that the Münchhausen Trilemma breaks the legs of "philosophy" and "any other possible approach to reality." It only breaks the legs of rationality-based philosophies and approaches to reality. If so-called reality is an illusion, all falls into place. I would certainly agree, though, that the Münchhausen Trilemma breaks the legs of science.

The story behind the below quotation is interesting.

Connection Between Observation and the Material World

A friend of mine sent me the following video about an interesting new technology. Isn't it interesting that everything we look for . . . we find?

Perhaps there's more of a connection between the act of observation and our "discoveries" than we realize. Maybe we're actually creating the world, rather than discovering it. I talk about this in The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder.

Latest 5-Star Review of The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder

I'm listening to the Reds game while I write this. I just had to turn down the sound on another cancer commercial. Ask yourself what they're selling in those commercials and realize that healthcare providers, like all corporations, are actively about the business of expanding their markets. Think about that and you will turn down the sound on all such commercials too. That's the topic of my next book, the current working title of which is The Obamacare Experiments.

In the meantime, I have this other book out there called The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder, and my friend and colleague, Thomas Cothran, has been so kind as to post a review on Amazon. While Thomas gave the book five starts, in the review he also says of what you might call its philosophical argument:

"I'll let the reader make their own decision about the merits of this worldview. (The enemy of this metaphysics is Aristotle.) For my own part, I remain cheerfully Aristotelian.

In other words, The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder in essence lays the responsibility for all the woes of modern society squarely at the feet of Aristotle's rationalism, and young Thomas--who's favorite philosopher is Kierkegaard but doesn't recognize that Kierkegaard was anti-Aristotilian too--remains unconvinced.

Not to worry. I've challenged my good friend to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for himself, a challenge to which he has agreed. We shall see if he remains cheerfully Aristotelian after that.

I'll keep you posted. Thanks, Thomas!