Walter M. Brasch has written extensively over the years from the left, screaming about the wrongs of corporate America, speaking out on behalf of workers' rights and the fouling of the Earth's environment, and damning the military-industrial complex.
A prolific author, he has written 17 books, all of them nonfiction, until now.
"Before the First Snow: Stories from the Revolution" is fiction, but it captures the flavor of the 1960s revolution that swept America from quite a different perspective.
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David Ascher is a writer and magazine editor of a liberal magazine, and not a very happy soul, by all accounts.
One day, manning a table on a bleak day during a booksigning in central Pennsylvania (where no one is buying his books), he encounters a woman who seems to breathe with all the fire of the radical past of a generation ago.
Apryl Greene hasn't lost her spirit of standing up for what's right or of speaking out on behalf of the alienated and downtrodden.
She wants to build a school for peace and the arts.
Ascher, world-weary and cynical, has been down these ideological dead end roads before.
And so begins the story of a man and a woman whose lives become intertwined and who take on the forces of evil out to destroy Greene's dream.
Brasch, a retired Bloomsburg University journalism professor, does a fine job of capturing the forces that drive people who sacrifice to make a difference in the world and the frustrations they come up against.
The book is, in part, a sweeping perspective of America between 1964 and 1991, when the nation was indeed undergoing much change.
It's a book not without humor, and Greene and Ascher are two very unforgettable and interesting characters.
The story does not flow in a simple linear fashion so the reader must pay close attention.
The odd-numbered chapters cover 1990 to 1991, while the even chapters, through articles written by Ascher, reel through the quarter century of events and lives of people preceding those two years.
Brasch, an award-winning journalist, called the novel "an intellectual exercise."
"There are a number of layers in this book, and some of the mystery is to find out what relates to what," he stated.
He said the story is about a character who was a major part of the '60s revolution, a woman retaining her principles as the nation moved from acid rock to the return of the "Happy Days" mentality.
Brasch's nonfiction repertoire includes the books "The Joy of Sax: America During the Bill Clinton Era" and "Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush."
For more information about Brasch, visit www.greeleyandstone.com.
