Monument - by Michael Cary (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A Young Drifter's Ascent from Prairie Tragedy to the Dark Rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany.

Monument is a novel of desperation and aspiration. George Gexler, a young German-American, flees high plains natural wonder and sudden tragedy in the lengthening shadow of the Great Depression, joining America's nomadic homeless riding the rails with hope in the distance and mortal danger close at hand. On Mount Rushmore's eastern face, he is with the genius sculptor Gutzom Borglum and the men jackhammering his vision of immortality for American democracy and his own artistic legacy.

George finds love and literature in the stacks of the Rapid City, South Dakota Carnegie library and terror at the top of a grain elevator. His ease at great heights and his strength and steadiness in the face of adversity commend him to those of vision and take him ultimately to his parents' homeland on an extraordinary assignment: pointing a handheld camera down into the rapture of the new Naziism of 1934.

This is a story of the land and its hold on the imagination of artists, poets, and builders of monuments and those who serve them, of two American presidents and an extraordinary first lady, all coming to an empty place being made new. It is a story of two nations rising, of genius in the service of evil, and of redemption through American optimism and lovers' pluck. The view is broad, from prairie horizon to vast zeppelin field.

About the Author

Michael Cary grew up in a small farming town in northern Maine, just miles from the Canadian border, picking potatoes as a boy when school recessed for the fall harvest. The first in his family to go to college, he graduated from Bowdoin College and went on to earn master's degrees from Brown and Yale Divinity School.

A long career in education followed, as assistant dean at Bates College, teacher and dean at Deerfield Academy, admissions officer at Amherst College, Klingenstein Fellow and later lecturer at Teachers College Columbia, and headmaster at the Lawrenceville School.

Despite the rewards of bright, striving students and the beauty of carefully designed campus landscapes, Michael returned to work in the natural world he loved on behalf of one of America's most pristine settings. As executive director of the Yellowstone Park Foundation, he gathered resources for Park projects and programs for which federal appropriation did not provide. Exploring Yellowstone's wonders, working with and learning from Park Service Rangers, as well as hiking the Blacktail Plateau in winter, with gray wolves howling in the distance, all deepened his love for unspoiled wilderness. Driving small-town Montana with its diners that feature menus eschewing egg white omelets and working folk who regard you carefully then welcome you warmly, he saw what he had known in rural Maine.

Michael has loved the natural world and he has loved the classroom, teaching English, European history, art history, philosophy, and religion. All of this is in the sentences that make up the story of Monument.

Michael lives with Jane, his wife of forty-eight years, in Amherst, Massachusetts.