Join us with authors Chris Lodwig, Vincent Casale, and Mark Torres.
Chris Lodwig, author of “Systemic” – For generations, a sentient AI has watched over the world and solved all of humanity’s problems. It was an era of objectivity, social equality, and ecological recovery. It should have been a golden age. Now, three strangers are on a pilgrimage through the arid lonely sagelands and underpopulated cities of the Systemic era on their way to the seemingly innocuous town of Prower. There, they will uncover the secrets that lay buried beneath the town and learn the truth about their half-remembered pasts. In the end, they must choose between their sanity or solving humanity’s final and most intractable problem.
Vincent Casale, author of “Beat Cop: CPOP 1986” – The tale of young New York City policeman assigned to the newly implemented Community Patrol Officers Program. The concept of CPOP was to advance police /community relations by putting the cop back on the beat, door to door, store to store. The male protagonists are flawed men, using unnecessary cynicism and hedonistic night-life adventures to shield their emotions. The female lead, Ann Caputo, is born wired to believe she can make a difference in a professional world dominated by the male ego. Will that stay true when she can’t protect herself from a violent assault and the guilt that engulfs her?Frank Colleri and his policemen cohorts are a study in the psychology of young cops facing danger, enduring conflict, and learning empathy or staying devoid of feeling. They own issues of divorce, drinking, and machismo, all while witnessing the worst in life. When the Police Commissioner learns of sexual assaults occurring in his daughter’s neighborhood, he orders all CPOP members to help detectives with individual cases, by converging on and aiding crime victims.
Mark Torres, author of “Long Island Migrant Labor Camps: Dust For Blood” – During World War II, a group of potato farmers opened the first migrant labor camp in Suffolk County to house farmworkers from Jamaica. Over the next twenty years, more than one hundred camps of various sizes would be built throughout the region. Thousands of migrant workers lured by promises of good wages and decent housing flocked to Eastern Long Island, where they were often cheated out of pay and housed in deadly slum-like conditions. Preyed on by corrupt camp operators and entrapped in a feudal system that left them mired in debt, laborers struggled and, in some cases, perished in the shadow of New York’s affluence. Author Mark A. Torres reveals the dreadful history of Long Island’s migrant labor camps from their inception to their peak in 1960 and their steady decline in the following decades.