Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Thin books or fat journals ? Hard to tell !

For a time I thought my Dawson series of books would come out in parts of a periodical magazine :

Triumph of the NATURAL

"The Mills of Nature" will start up its longer (6000 word) articles with a series that puts together a natural world oriented account of WWII.

If that all sounds very Olympian , rest assured it will be instantly sharply brought down to earth.

That is because the series will be told through the eyes of just a single individual,  who himself barely got out of town during all of WWII.

You will read of the wartime experiences of New York City based Dr Martin Henry Dawson.

Dawson was a decorated Canadian WWI hero and the leading DNA and Penicillin pioneer.

But Dawson couldn't re-join the military in WWII ,as he had hoped , because he was slowly dying of an auto immune disease throughout the war.

But even if he had gone overseas he couldn't have told this big a story.

Because oddly enough , no frontline military general or overly-busy national leader ever had as intimate an overview of the entire war as a well connected and media-hungry New Yorker.

New York city was the world's biggest , richest city and its biggest port.

It was thusthe war's biggest transfer point for both cargo and both in and outbound troops (not to mention all the just-passing-though VIPs).

This alone made it home to the war's best informed and most varied gossip.

New York was also a wartime city with the world's most varied and freest media.

But that isn't enough to pick out Dawson.

Many equally well-read among the eight million New Yorkers would also seem qualified to tell this tale.

However, in what turned out to be an unexpectedly long war of attrition, the question of sustaining manpower numbers and morale became the paramount question above all others - on both sides.

And so as it happened, the very contrary minded and penicillin-pioneering Dawson ended up becoming very close to the turning point of this vital issue.

This chance of fate , combined with his unusually wide WWI war experiences and his endless curiosity as a reader and listener makes him a wonderful subject to tell Nature's side of the war through.

Admittedly, it is a risk to use the eyes of a homebound dying man to tell the story of a war spread over all the world.

But few military events of WWII could have had a bigger impact on our own post war world than the penicillin events personally initiated by this hometown-bound and dying doctor.

His story over that six year period will be told in about sixty vignettes , collected into six series parts , all determined by six decisive breaks in Dawson's actual WWII experience.

Major parts' titles and their individual time periods :

I : Discarding the Small : roughly from the Fall of 1939 to the Fall of 1940

II : Exalting the Small :  roughly from the Fall of 1940 to the Fall of 1941

III : Betraying the Small : roughly from the Fall of 1941 to the Fall of 1942

IV : Agitating the Small : roughly from the Fall of 1942 to the Fall of 1943

V : Denying the Small : roughly from the Fall of 1943 to the Fall of 1944

VI : Triumph of the Natural : roughly from the Fall of 1944 to the Fall of 1945

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