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Anarchy
Set amid the tumultuous days of American dissent against the Vietnam War and worldwide student protests, Anarchy brings Tim Rosencrantz, from Wild Blue Yonder, back into Nathaniel Hawthorne's life with evil and disruption. Tim, an SDS member, avowed communist and anarchist, has had a transformation on the bombed-out streets of New York and is now a full-fledged member of Weatherman. Bent on bombing America to its senses, he wants Nate at his side. Nate, although anti-war and intellectually sympathetic, is unwilling to participate in Tim’s anarchy -- until, that is, Tim blackmails him. Their lives become an antagonistic pas de deux as the stakes They try to remain collegial while despising each other's lifestyle. Unknown to Nate, the FBI has Tim and Crystal, his naive teenaged moll, under surveillance. As Tim and Crystal plot the bombing of a Bank of America, everyone realizes this cannot end well -- but just how badly they cannot imagine.
310 pages, Paperback
Published May 23, 2019
2 people want to read
About the author
Jack B. Rochester
16 books13 followersAs a grad student, Jack B. Rochester longed to see a book with his name on the cover. Today, it’s on sixteen books and counting. He launched his career as a business book editor and guided 65 authors’ books into print. Then his own company, Joshua Tree Interactive, and the bestselling “The Naked Computer,” three college textbooks, and his swan song/last hurrah, the internationally acclaimed “Pirates of the Digital Millennium” (both TNC and PODM co-authored with John Gantz).
In 2007, he turned to writing fiction: his Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers literary trilogy was published by Wheatmark (paperback, Kindle, Audible). Two distinctly different novels and a short story collection are in the works. You can follow his writing and read his Saturday Book Reviews at JackBoston, his innovative website.
Jack spends a lot of his time mentoring writers. He specializes in ghostwriting business books, but has also ghosted works as diverse as a personal growth book and a novel. He counsels writers one-on-one and in writing workshops across the country.
He’s the co-founder of The Fictional Café, an online ‘zine publishing fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, fine art, photography, and fiction podcasts for 800 subscribers in 46 countries. “The Strong Stuff: The Best of Fictional Café, 2013-2017,” was published in a limited edition in 2019.
Jack earned a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from California State University at Sonoma. He grew up in South Dakota and Wyoming, spent many years on the West Coast, and now lives in the Boston area with his wife. An avid cyclist, he owns five bicycles. As he likes to say, no moss grows beneath his feet.
In 2007, he turned to writing fiction: his Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers literary trilogy was published by Wheatmark (paperback, Kindle, Audible). Two distinctly different novels and a short story collection are in the works. You can follow his writing and read his Saturday Book Reviews at JackBoston, his innovative website.
Jack spends a lot of his time mentoring writers. He specializes in ghostwriting business books, but has also ghosted works as diverse as a personal growth book and a novel. He counsels writers one-on-one and in writing workshops across the country.
He’s the co-founder of The Fictional Café, an online ‘zine publishing fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, fine art, photography, and fiction podcasts for 800 subscribers in 46 countries. “The Strong Stuff: The Best of Fictional Café, 2013-2017,” was published in a limited edition in 2019.
Jack earned a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from California State University at Sonoma. He grew up in South Dakota and Wyoming, spent many years on the West Coast, and now lives in the Boston area with his wife. An avid cyclist, he owns five bicycles. As he likes to say, no moss grows beneath his feet.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 10, 2019
Anarchy Review – Randy Cade April 2019
I read and reviewed Wild Blue Yonder, Jack Rochester’s first novel in the Nathaniel Flowers series and enjoyed it. Anarchy is measurably better in terms of story, character development, precision of writing and editing, and just plain entertainment value. There’s more action, more humor, better backstories, better storytelling in general.
Anarchy in the story of Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers (thanks to the abbreviation Nate) who is a former prisoner of the military system, a partially drug-fueled rebel and a recently published author who through his initial published offering of short stories shows extreme promise. He is on a book signing tour with his publishing agent and beautiful girlfriend when he is confronted with a surprise visit from an old Air Force buddy who has been seduced by and fallen completely for the flawed and chaotic dogma of anarchy as manifested in the 1970s by the political radicals of the time; the Black Power Movement, the Viet Nam Day Committee, and most notably Weatherman, all of which I had the pleasure of encountering as a campus radio reporter during my 4 years at UC Berkeley (1968-1972).
I am drawn to Rochester’s novels because we share some of these same experiences, being from the same age group. We’ve been to some of the same places, and we both survived the vicissitudes of the 60s, 70s 80s 90s etc.. These included the Free Speech Movement, the hippie culture, campus riots, and careers (although mine was shorter lived) in the world of publishing.
What this novel has to offer is a period piece look at the inside of these subversive philosophies from both the human action side and also from the dialectic surrounding the debate as to whether we should be a society of laws, hierarchies and private property, or social justice as defined by the revolutionaries of the time.
It is here I have my primary criticism of this novel: Often the dialogue lapses into an all too formal presentation, if not defense, of the philosophy of classic anarchism, as expressed by its original definers of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Emma Goldman, even the Marx, Lenin, Trotsky-ites who bridged the gap between anarchy and communism— in this writer’s view two extremely flawed philosophies. The anarchist buddy of Nate, Tim Rosencrantz (A.K.A. Jude Lenine) lays out and defends these tenets ad nauseum, justifying violence to property and institutions (although not human beings) as a viable alternative to the laws and structures then operating in American society.
Tim’s dialogue is at times too formal, too learned, too much like an extended lecture of the history and practice of “classic” anarchy. People don’t often talk like this; I just didn’t find that anarchist crowd all that damned intelligent. But the story will still hold your interest as these moments are punctuated by the sort of frenetic actions of the main characters. Go here, go there, do a book signing, buy dynamite, blow shit up, smoke pot, have sex, drop acid and go look at nature and listen to classic rock and jazz. Kinda fun, don’tcha think? This book is a learning experience with solid political discourse which is accelerated with excitement and fun.
All in all this is a very valuable novel from the standpoint of getting inside the heads of people who have been influenced and moved and captured by a radical philosophy. As well, it charts the development of main character Nate as he deals with both the philosophical and personal sides of outlaw behavior. He seems a critic, yet right on the edge of it.
I challenge (dare) today’s progressives and neo-socialists to read this book, as it teaches us something about the dark side of fighting the establishment. The dramatic ending alone will convince you of that, not to mention Nate’s disdain, and subsequent sympathy for, anarchy.
Randy Cade reviews and publishes on Goodreads and Amazon Kindle.
I read and reviewed Wild Blue Yonder, Jack Rochester’s first novel in the Nathaniel Flowers series and enjoyed it. Anarchy is measurably better in terms of story, character development, precision of writing and editing, and just plain entertainment value. There’s more action, more humor, better backstories, better storytelling in general.
Anarchy in the story of Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers (thanks to the abbreviation Nate) who is a former prisoner of the military system, a partially drug-fueled rebel and a recently published author who through his initial published offering of short stories shows extreme promise. He is on a book signing tour with his publishing agent and beautiful girlfriend when he is confronted with a surprise visit from an old Air Force buddy who has been seduced by and fallen completely for the flawed and chaotic dogma of anarchy as manifested in the 1970s by the political radicals of the time; the Black Power Movement, the Viet Nam Day Committee, and most notably Weatherman, all of which I had the pleasure of encountering as a campus radio reporter during my 4 years at UC Berkeley (1968-1972).
I am drawn to Rochester’s novels because we share some of these same experiences, being from the same age group. We’ve been to some of the same places, and we both survived the vicissitudes of the 60s, 70s 80s 90s etc.. These included the Free Speech Movement, the hippie culture, campus riots, and careers (although mine was shorter lived) in the world of publishing.
What this novel has to offer is a period piece look at the inside of these subversive philosophies from both the human action side and also from the dialectic surrounding the debate as to whether we should be a society of laws, hierarchies and private property, or social justice as defined by the revolutionaries of the time.
It is here I have my primary criticism of this novel: Often the dialogue lapses into an all too formal presentation, if not defense, of the philosophy of classic anarchism, as expressed by its original definers of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Emma Goldman, even the Marx, Lenin, Trotsky-ites who bridged the gap between anarchy and communism— in this writer’s view two extremely flawed philosophies. The anarchist buddy of Nate, Tim Rosencrantz (A.K.A. Jude Lenine) lays out and defends these tenets ad nauseum, justifying violence to property and institutions (although not human beings) as a viable alternative to the laws and structures then operating in American society.
Tim’s dialogue is at times too formal, too learned, too much like an extended lecture of the history and practice of “classic” anarchy. People don’t often talk like this; I just didn’t find that anarchist crowd all that damned intelligent. But the story will still hold your interest as these moments are punctuated by the sort of frenetic actions of the main characters. Go here, go there, do a book signing, buy dynamite, blow shit up, smoke pot, have sex, drop acid and go look at nature and listen to classic rock and jazz. Kinda fun, don’tcha think? This book is a learning experience with solid political discourse which is accelerated with excitement and fun.
All in all this is a very valuable novel from the standpoint of getting inside the heads of people who have been influenced and moved and captured by a radical philosophy. As well, it charts the development of main character Nate as he deals with both the philosophical and personal sides of outlaw behavior. He seems a critic, yet right on the edge of it.
I challenge (dare) today’s progressives and neo-socialists to read this book, as it teaches us something about the dark side of fighting the establishment. The dramatic ending alone will convince you of that, not to mention Nate’s disdain, and subsequent sympathy for, anarchy.
Randy Cade reviews and publishes on Goodreads and Amazon Kindle.
August 10, 2019
Jack B. Rochester’s third Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers novel, Anarchy, takes place mostly in northern California in 1970, and like the time and place it is turbulent and full of surprises. It is a “big picture” book that explores the perennial issue of change—personal and political—and how to live a meaningful life. The paths taken are messy, complicated, contradictory, confounding, ruining, engaged, delusional, and exalted. It’s a book about learning, asking, seeking, loving, and above all, acting to produce worthwhile change.
Nathaniel Flowers is a student, an artist, a writer, a thinker, a military veteran, and a doer. He wants to make a difference, and like many college-age folks in the 1960s and 70s wants to end the war in Vietnam, bring about left-liberal social/political change, and make the world (and his life) better than it is. The question, of course, is how to do it?
The answers are varied and complex: through art (Nate’s book is titled The Pieces Fit); through love—he has a girlfriend, Jane, who is also a writer, a poet writing “Cosmogony” (the story of the origin and development of the universe); through friends and friendship and personal relationships and loyalties; through dropping out (the I Ching, drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll); and through political action, street action, and anarchy—the philosophy of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman of individual responsibility (and action) for social and political liberation.
I know this from the book—and from my own experiences. I remember the endless meetings and discussions and debates about what to do, what to do, what to do, conversations of hope and despair, Amerika versus America, staying in or dropping out, being a hippie, yippie, or dippie; whether to use violence or not.
In this story, Nate represents the hopeful end of this spectrum, as does Jane. They write to change America and the world. They—especially Nate—want to do more, but what more, how more, when more, and with whom more is what this book is about, or as Camus wrote, how to live and act and be “neither victims nor executioners?”
Tim Rosencrantz, who changes his name to Jude Lennine, takes a different path. He’s an angry veteran, Weatherman, and ex-Weatherman, seeking love and acceptance as he blows his way up across Amerika, from Chicago to New York to California. Since Jude is the patron saint of lost causes and Lennine is after Vladimir Lenin, we pretty much know how this path of political change will work out. Even so, it is a surprising and moving ending, as Tim/Jude represents hope that becomes despair.
Between Nate and Tim, hope and despair, falls seventeen-year-old Crystal—hippie love, free love, love, love, love, who becomes a collateral cost—as flower power became mutated into political power and drugs.
The book begins with a bombing in Chicago and another in New York—killing three people—and ends with another bomb and more death in California, but this is NOT the story. This is the vehicle for telling the story.
The story is Nate’s (and Jane’s) search for a way forward—a way to be and act in the world, a way to make a difference—and with some help from the example of Tim/Jude’s futility and destructiveness, Nate finds it in a synthesis of love (Jane and friends), anarchy (theory and praxis) and art (all artists are anarchists, Tim says). Nate finally has something to believe and act upon, a way to commit actions of high moral purpose and liberate himself (and the world) from within and without.
Anarchy is a story of the 60s and 70s for those of us trying to figure out what to do today—or as Yogi Berra said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
The book is an engaging, insightful, and exciting read. Thankfully, there will be another. Until then, I say, “Write on!”
Mark Greenside…………………
Nathaniel Flowers is a student, an artist, a writer, a thinker, a military veteran, and a doer. He wants to make a difference, and like many college-age folks in the 1960s and 70s wants to end the war in Vietnam, bring about left-liberal social/political change, and make the world (and his life) better than it is. The question, of course, is how to do it?
The answers are varied and complex: through art (Nate’s book is titled The Pieces Fit); through love—he has a girlfriend, Jane, who is also a writer, a poet writing “Cosmogony” (the story of the origin and development of the universe); through friends and friendship and personal relationships and loyalties; through dropping out (the I Ching, drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll); and through political action, street action, and anarchy—the philosophy of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman of individual responsibility (and action) for social and political liberation.
I know this from the book—and from my own experiences. I remember the endless meetings and discussions and debates about what to do, what to do, what to do, conversations of hope and despair, Amerika versus America, staying in or dropping out, being a hippie, yippie, or dippie; whether to use violence or not.
In this story, Nate represents the hopeful end of this spectrum, as does Jane. They write to change America and the world. They—especially Nate—want to do more, but what more, how more, when more, and with whom more is what this book is about, or as Camus wrote, how to live and act and be “neither victims nor executioners?”
Tim Rosencrantz, who changes his name to Jude Lennine, takes a different path. He’s an angry veteran, Weatherman, and ex-Weatherman, seeking love and acceptance as he blows his way up across Amerika, from Chicago to New York to California. Since Jude is the patron saint of lost causes and Lennine is after Vladimir Lenin, we pretty much know how this path of political change will work out. Even so, it is a surprising and moving ending, as Tim/Jude represents hope that becomes despair.
Between Nate and Tim, hope and despair, falls seventeen-year-old Crystal—hippie love, free love, love, love, love, who becomes a collateral cost—as flower power became mutated into political power and drugs.
The book begins with a bombing in Chicago and another in New York—killing three people—and ends with another bomb and more death in California, but this is NOT the story. This is the vehicle for telling the story.
The story is Nate’s (and Jane’s) search for a way forward—a way to be and act in the world, a way to make a difference—and with some help from the example of Tim/Jude’s futility and destructiveness, Nate finds it in a synthesis of love (Jane and friends), anarchy (theory and praxis) and art (all artists are anarchists, Tim says). Nate finally has something to believe and act upon, a way to commit actions of high moral purpose and liberate himself (and the world) from within and without.
Anarchy is a story of the 60s and 70s for those of us trying to figure out what to do today—or as Yogi Berra said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
The book is an engaging, insightful, and exciting read. Thankfully, there will be another. Until then, I say, “Write on!”
Mark Greenside…………………
August 19, 2019
ANARCHY
After the first two novels in Jack B . Rochester’s Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers series it would be difficult to imagine the eponymous protagonist as an actual anarchist, a word with connotations of the angry young bomb throwers in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the anarchist Armand in Romain Gary’s Lady L, who as a priest holds up a dead rat in front of the congregation as his final act of priestliness.
Nate is now a published writer with a reputation to polish and a terrific girl friend to nourish. Though unlikely to throw bombs, he is certainly a deep reader of the writers of the day, from Sartre to Marcuse, from Stranger in a Strange Land to the I Ching. No matter how far he is from throwing a bomb, Anarchy lingered in the air over Kent State and other outrages of civil disobedience.
This means that a second character, an antagonist if you will, must reemerge in the semi-incoherent and very angry Tim Rosencrantz, an acquaintance and troublemaker from Nate’s days in the Air Force. Tortured Tim would like nothing more than to share his condition with Nate and Jane. Through some rather clumsy blackmail does draw them in. He may not have killed anyone yet, but it seems foreordained, and in the second half of the book this is the source of the tension.
Nate has become a student again. Tim recedes for a time into the background, but we know he will be back. Toward the middle of the book Nate gives a reading of a short story called “Biting Through,” a reference to the I-Ching hexagram 21. The story is the caramel at the center of this delicious book. It is, of course, about the destruction anarchy can wreak. In a rather clever way it draws the line between the two characters, setting up the conflict, which draws many of the secondary characters into the turmoil.
Then the FBI gets involved, and everyone gallops unknowing toward the tragicomic ending.
The anger of those years comes through. The Weather Underground was bombing ROTC buildings. Police were covering college campuses with tear gas. The war in Vietnam trotted on like the six hundred charging into the Valley of Death. The draft was increasingly unpopular and rebellion was in the air. One result still with us is a volunteer military isolated from mainstream life, and so subject to neglect and misuse with no recourse and little oversight. Today, in other words.
So the main tension in this book is between order and chaos. It’s setting at UC Santa Cruz, the campus where Chaos Theory was developed, is appropriate. Order demands concessions, and anarchy demands sacrifice. In the end, because this book is not essentially a tragedy, order prevails, but it requires a fair amount of Biting Through: “Recourse to law and penalties overcomes the disturbances of harmonious social life caused by criminals and slanderers.”
After the first two novels in Jack B . Rochester’s Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers series it would be difficult to imagine the eponymous protagonist as an actual anarchist, a word with connotations of the angry young bomb throwers in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the anarchist Armand in Romain Gary’s Lady L, who as a priest holds up a dead rat in front of the congregation as his final act of priestliness.
Nate is now a published writer with a reputation to polish and a terrific girl friend to nourish. Though unlikely to throw bombs, he is certainly a deep reader of the writers of the day, from Sartre to Marcuse, from Stranger in a Strange Land to the I Ching. No matter how far he is from throwing a bomb, Anarchy lingered in the air over Kent State and other outrages of civil disobedience.
This means that a second character, an antagonist if you will, must reemerge in the semi-incoherent and very angry Tim Rosencrantz, an acquaintance and troublemaker from Nate’s days in the Air Force. Tortured Tim would like nothing more than to share his condition with Nate and Jane. Through some rather clumsy blackmail does draw them in. He may not have killed anyone yet, but it seems foreordained, and in the second half of the book this is the source of the tension.
Nate has become a student again. Tim recedes for a time into the background, but we know he will be back. Toward the middle of the book Nate gives a reading of a short story called “Biting Through,” a reference to the I-Ching hexagram 21. The story is the caramel at the center of this delicious book. It is, of course, about the destruction anarchy can wreak. In a rather clever way it draws the line between the two characters, setting up the conflict, which draws many of the secondary characters into the turmoil.
Then the FBI gets involved, and everyone gallops unknowing toward the tragicomic ending.
The anger of those years comes through. The Weather Underground was bombing ROTC buildings. Police were covering college campuses with tear gas. The war in Vietnam trotted on like the six hundred charging into the Valley of Death. The draft was increasingly unpopular and rebellion was in the air. One result still with us is a volunteer military isolated from mainstream life, and so subject to neglect and misuse with no recourse and little oversight. Today, in other words.
So the main tension in this book is between order and chaos. It’s setting at UC Santa Cruz, the campus where Chaos Theory was developed, is appropriate. Order demands concessions, and anarchy demands sacrifice. In the end, because this book is not essentially a tragedy, order prevails, but it requires a fair amount of Biting Through: “Recourse to law and penalties overcomes the disturbances of harmonious social life caused by criminals and slanderers.”
August 12, 2019
Jack B. Rochester’s third, and perhaps best, installment of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers novels finds the protagonist, Nate, at life-altering crossroads. Riding the high from the love he kindled with Jane Chandler in the previous book, Madrone, Nate’s fortunes quickly turn as he is swept up in a wave of increasingly dangerous and illegal anti-establishment acts perpetrated by friend and fellow Air Force veteran from Wild Blue Yonder, Tim Rosencrantz.
The action and emotional intensity are as high as the stakes in this novel, bringing the reader from the comfy confines of the University of California, Santa Cruz, to the big cities of Chicago and New York and back through northern California. Nate is at a point in his life where he is still trying to figure out who he is and what he stands for, allowing the concept of anarchy to gestate long enough in his mind to lead him and his girlfriend down a dark path. He gets swept up in Tim’s anarchic plans while trying to navigate his life as a newly published author, all the while trying to decide if anarchy really is his calling.
Although Nate is the series protagonist, Anarchy is really Tim’s tale. We watch him plot out his acts of defiance, never shy about hopping on his soapbox to extoll the virtues and philosophies of anarchy as he sees it. Though Tim seems to be a loner type, he wants company on his quest, and desperately seeks out partners in crime throughout the book, only to find rejection nearly each step of the way. One cannot help but feel for him. He, too, is trying to find his identity, manifested in his confusion about his own sexuality and his inability to “fit in” with Weatherman (an anarchist group), the students (Nate and Jane) or the surfers with whom he lives. Even his love interest doesn’t seem to quite mesh with him.
What makes Anarchy work is the plotline of the familiar main characters of previous books interweaving with Tim’s (an ancillary character in Wild Blue Yonder, the first book) as we learn his true colors. The reader gets just enough Nate and Jane to satisfy the appetite for their story’s momentum and evolution, while leaving room to really explore Tim’s psyche, past, and motives for pursuing his radical path. By the end of this thrill ride, the reader is left contemplating the fallout from Anarchy’s chain of destructive
August 12, 2019
I was so excited to learn of the third installment of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers story. I met Nate in Jack B. Rochester’s first novel, Wild Blue Yonder, which followed his journey in and out of the Air Force during the Vietnam War and back to his true love at home. His post-Air Force life was documented in the follow-up novel, Madrone, describing Nathaniel's love for Jane Chandler and his quest to become a writer as he follows Jane to college at UC Santa Cruz.
Anarchy continues Nathaniel’s journey as a newly published author, his true love Jane Chandler by his side and a not-so-chance-reconnection with an Air Force buddy, Tim Rosencrantz. Nate is forced to make some difficult choices about personal alliances, creative freedom and political investment. The title alludes not only to Tim Rosencrantz’s involvement with Weatherman, but to the personal battles with counter-culture, anti-establishment, war dissention and forbidden lifestyles experienced by every character.
As a result, Anarchy is more suspenseful than its predecessors, Wild Blue Yonder and Madrone. The way the author weaves actual historic events like the Kent State massacre and anti-establishment bombings in Chicago, New York and California into the story gave me an enhanced mental image of the UC Santa Cruz campus, Northern California and society as a whole during the 1970s. It was as if I was there with Nate and Jane experiencing the dissention, passion and politics of the Vietnam War era. I was disappointed, sad, apprehensive, shocked and elated right along with them.
The writing style, story line and character development made this novel hard to put down. Nathaniel and Jane feel like good friends to me. The kind of friends that you can be out of contact with for years, but when you reconnect, it’s like you were never apart. Concerned for his safety, I even found myself mentally trying to discourage Tim from continuing his anti-establishment ways.
Anarchy was an extraordinary read and did not disappoint as the third installment in the Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers trilogy. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel and was pleasantly surprised by the thriller aspect.
Anarchy continues Nathaniel’s journey as a newly published author, his true love Jane Chandler by his side and a not-so-chance-reconnection with an Air Force buddy, Tim Rosencrantz. Nate is forced to make some difficult choices about personal alliances, creative freedom and political investment. The title alludes not only to Tim Rosencrantz’s involvement with Weatherman, but to the personal battles with counter-culture, anti-establishment, war dissention and forbidden lifestyles experienced by every character.
As a result, Anarchy is more suspenseful than its predecessors, Wild Blue Yonder and Madrone. The way the author weaves actual historic events like the Kent State massacre and anti-establishment bombings in Chicago, New York and California into the story gave me an enhanced mental image of the UC Santa Cruz campus, Northern California and society as a whole during the 1970s. It was as if I was there with Nate and Jane experiencing the dissention, passion and politics of the Vietnam War era. I was disappointed, sad, apprehensive, shocked and elated right along with them.
The writing style, story line and character development made this novel hard to put down. Nathaniel and Jane feel like good friends to me. The kind of friends that you can be out of contact with for years, but when you reconnect, it’s like you were never apart. Concerned for his safety, I even found myself mentally trying to discourage Tim from continuing his anti-establishment ways.
Anarchy was an extraordinary read and did not disappoint as the third installment in the Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers trilogy. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel and was pleasantly surprised by the thriller aspect.
August 9, 2019
As a fan of Rochester's work, in particular the story of Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers, I had many expectations coming to the third book in the series. I'm thrilled to report that these were not only met, but also that I was routinely surprised and delighted with Rochester's storytelling.
In an unexpected and extremely compelling pivot, Rochester weaves a thriller-esque storyline throughout Anarchy. Tim Rosencrantz's arrival propels a terrific plot involving the Weatherman terrorist attacks, FBI investigations, and unrequited love. All of which our favorite characters, Nate and Jane, find themselves mixed up in. Tim is a fascinating character—charismatic, conflicted, and increasingly unhinged as he works toward his goal of total anarchy.
When juxtaposed against our hero Nate Flowers, we begin to understand just how similar and different these two men are, what they value, and why it matters. The parallel stories of Tim and Nate offers a truly unique perspective on the historical setting, 1970s America.
In an unexpected and extremely compelling pivot, Rochester weaves a thriller-esque storyline throughout Anarchy. Tim Rosencrantz's arrival propels a terrific plot involving the Weatherman terrorist attacks, FBI investigations, and unrequited love. All of which our favorite characters, Nate and Jane, find themselves mixed up in. Tim is a fascinating character—charismatic, conflicted, and increasingly unhinged as he works toward his goal of total anarchy.
When juxtaposed against our hero Nate Flowers, we begin to understand just how similar and different these two men are, what they value, and why it matters. The parallel stories of Tim and Nate offers a truly unique perspective on the historical setting, 1970s America.
April 23, 2020
Anarchy by Jack Rochester was referred to me as a must-read novel from a friend, and I blindly bought it without any insight into its ‘story,’ (which is my favorite method of discovery). My surprise experience with Anarchy was the same experience that I had with The DiVinci Code, and when I saw Pulp Fiction for the first time…it blew my mind! Admittedly, I didn’t know at the time of purchase this was the 3rd book in a trilogy, and I worried that I would be lost in the storyline, but I was not. The story of Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers is fast, fanatical and parallels a historical reality that is all too possible, so much so that I often questioned my own knowledge of what was fact, and, ‘Wait…IS THIS REALLY FICTION, or what?" I mean, what writer weaves Cosmogony as a tell for the foreshadowing of his characters? So first I was, ‘what the hell is Cosmogony? Then I was, ’OK, now which character?' Come on man, it drove me nuts! Great read and now I must read more!
August 14, 2019
Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers has moved on from the “Air Farce” only to find himself caught up in the newly evolving world of ANARCHY. Our literary anti-hero has survived the turbulent 1960s and enters the 70s decade with a bright future . . . however, these brighter days may be all for naught. Part “Doc Brown” and part “Forrest Gump,” author Jack Rochester once again allows us to step inside the pages of his “hippie time machine.” The brilliance of his book is how relevant the events of story—which are based upon actual historical incidents—could just as easily be occurring in 2019. Routinely funny, often serious, and always entertaining, Rochester has fleshed out a memorable character who keeps fans wanting more. No matter your age or your politics, Anarchy provides something for everyone.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews