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Thursday, June 28, 2012

Guest Blog: Molly Best Tinsley


 Today we welcome author Molly Best Tinsley who is promoting her book Entering the Blue Stone. Click on the banner above to check out the rest over her tour!

Publisher: Fuze Publishing
Date of Publication: May 2012

What happens when one's larger-than-life military parents--disciplined, distinguished, exacting--begin sliding out of control? The General struggles to maintain his invulnerable façade against Parkinson's disease; his lovely wife manifests a bizarre dementia. Their three grown children, desperate to save the situation, convince themselves of the perfect solution: an upscale retirement community. But as soon as their parents have been resettled within its walls, the many imperfections of its system of care begin to appear.

Charting the line between comedy and pathos, Molly Best Tinsley’s memoir,
Entering the Blue Stone dissects the chaos at the end of life and discovers what shines beneath: family bonds, the dignity of even an unsound mind, and the endurance of the heart.
Molly writes:

I spent a lot of my childhood overseas, beyond the reach of television.  Books from the Air Force base library were the main source of entertainment, and I was addicted as a kid to mysteries and baseball fiction, particularly a series modeled on the Brooklyn Dodgers back when there were Brooklyn Dodgers to battle the New York Yankees for the pennant.  Every month or so my mother would pry one such book out of my hands and replace it with a “classic.”  Oliver Twist, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre.  I remember reading Gone with the Wind over a weekend, curled in a particular wing chair in the living room.  

My mother was an avid reader too.  Over-educated and underemployed as a stay-at-home mom (where else was she going to be with four children?), constantly having a work of literary fiction or a biography going must have kept her brain challenged and alive.  She took her reading seriously, too—she was a one-woman book club. That was a far better alternative than attending a meeting of the Officers’ Wives Club back then, when one program consisted of a demonstration on how to make a penguin centerpiece from an eggplant.

Reading wasn’t just a matter of pleasure; books were also connected to education, and education was my parents’ obsession.  My mother’s father had been an immigrant from Spain, his English heavily accented and ungrammatical, a source, I suspect, of embarrassment when she was young.  Her achievements in school, capped by a full scholarship to Barnard College, paved the way out of the lower class for her, into acceptance and respectability.  My father’s parents were well-educated—a physician and a teacher—and he went to Princeton.  The Air Force might have seemed a strange choice for a Princeton grad, but it offered the opportunity and technical resources to pursue meteorology, his intellectual passion and a higher priority than making a lot of money.

Today I’m grateful to my parents for the high value they placed on books and learning, their emphasis on the life of the mind.  Their relative indifference to material things gave me the gift of freedom.  I don’t watch television because I can’t stand the barrage of commercials; I rarely set foot in the sacred shopping mall.  Thanks to them, I’ve stayed off the consumer merry-go-round, which keeps upping the price of the ride.

About the author:

Air Force brat Molly Best Tinsley taught on the civilian faculty at the United States Naval Academy for twenty years and is the institution’s first professor emerita. Author of My Life with Darwin (Houghton Mifflin) and Throwing Knives (Ohio State University Press), she also co-authored Satan’s Chamber (Fuze Publishing) and the textbook, The Creative Process (St. Martin’s). Her fiction has earned two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sandstone Prize, and the Oregon Book Award. Her plays have been read and produced nationwide. She lives in Oregon, where she divides her time between Ashland and Portland.

Price: $14.95 paperback, $9.99 ebook
ISBN: 9780984990818
Pages: 195
Release: May 2012

Amazon paperback buy link:
http://www.amazon.com/Entering-Blue-Stone-Molly-Tinsley/dp/098499081X?tag=tributebooks-20

Fuze Publishing paperback buy link:
http://fuzepublishing.com/books?fpcat=non-fiction-book

Amazon Kindle buy link:
http://www.amazon.com/Entering-the-Blue-Stone-ebook/dp/B007ZI429K?tag=tributebooks-20

Barnes&Noble.com Nook buy link:
http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=dcSBhG3Rj8w&subid=&offerid=239662.1&type=10&tmpid=8432&RD_PARM1=http%253A%252F%252Fwww.barnesandnoble.com%252Fw%252Fentering-the-blue-stone-molly-best-tinsley%252F1110598899%253Fean%253D2940014469494

1 comment:

Tribute Books said...

Kari, thanks for featuring Molly today.