Donald L Robinson

Leaving Iowa Donald L Robinson

Tom Land, recent college grad with a useless degree in history, finds a measure of 1969-flavored contentment as a small-town disc jockey spinning vinyl and philosophizing at the downstairs coffee shop. Through a quirky combination of a couple's lunch hour tryst and bureacratic oversight, Tom becomes immune to the military draft. But when he hears a gruesome tale of pure evil and a bomb exploding at the backdoor of the bank flings a beheaded body onto the alley asphalt, Tom is forced to come to grips with his cowardice, and is pushed to find a sufferable stance to the lunacy of the war. As the story's setting shifts among the war in Vietnam, a racist and corrupt legal establishment, the Woodstock music festival, and potential sanctuary in Canada, Tom gathers an ensemble of characters who become key players in a quest involving understanding, unraveling, renewal, integrity, and personal worth. Through Tom's pilgrimage in "Leaving Iowa," the viability of the human experiment is called into question. Is human romantic love enough to save us, as one of the characters concludes? Through crisp, fast-paced narrative and dialogue, the novel leads the reader to see that much of today's issues and chaos sprang out of an earlier time. Had we done better then, would we be doing better now? The true-to-life multi-layered characters grasp and inspire us as they tell a cautionary tale of hope and despair.