THE FLYING PADRE

About the Book

Welcome to New Albion! In this richly comic debut novel, Maurice Bassan takes on that political monster called California politics. Basedon Bassan's personal academic experiences, The Flying Padre vividly portrays the idealistic student rebellions of the 1960s, and the forces of conservatism in both government and academia that crushed them. The settings move between the State Capitol in Califea, presided over by one-eyed Governor Rex Rearwood, known as "The Flying Padre," and San Sebastian, where Chancellor Maximilian Garsha runs the State University with the help of the violent "Liberty Troopsmen" headed by General Jimmy Jingo James. The realism in the portraits of these recognizable, larger-than-Iife figures occasionally verges on an absurdist satire that resonates to the present day.

About the Author

Maurice Bassan was born and raised in The Bronx in a working-class immigrant family. He served on army posts, assembly lines, and restaurants before completing his education at New York University and UC Berkeley. He has marched in union parades in Manhattan; he marched in support of the student strike at San Francisco State University (where he taught for many years); and his marching continued in the streets of San Francisco in the years of U. S. aggression in Vietnam and Iraq. Bassan is currently teaching at the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning in San Francisco. His recent books under the Xlibris imprint include Haight Ashbury Sketches (2003, writing as Morris Bassan) and Twice-Told Poems (2008).