About the Story
Dr. Lee Brazil has never made peace with the South he grew up in as a child born without a left hand; nor with the prosthetic hook he wears and the nuclear industry he blames for his disability.
While researching material for his book, Ten Years in the Not-So-New South, in Pine Grove, Tennessee, the “Atomic City,” Lee attends a SOMOP meeting—Save Our Mountain and Our People—an activist group working to shut down the Pine Grove Labs incinerator for nuclear waste. When an explosion at the Labs occurs, Lee is caught up in the ensuing disaster and implicated in what is mistakenly believed to be a terrorist plot.
Managing to escape local authorities, his harrowing journey back home to Maine forces him to seek refuge in a number of unlikely places and solicit help from a number of unlikely allies, including Jean Kudrick, the lost love of his youth.
Now on the radar of federal agents tracking a terrorist cell in Boston, Lee is arrested before he reaches home. He is offered a deal: help the FBI foil a real terrorist plot, and avoid prosecution.
In confronting the politics of fear, Lee must challenge his perception of good and evil and struggle with the disabling fear to determine his course in reaching home.
About the Author
Dr. Ron Breazeale was born with a birth defect and lived in the real “Atomic City,” Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where his parents worked. He has lived much of the book, having worn a prosthetic hook most of his life and having grown up in the South, as a child with a disability. He left Maine in the early 1990s to return to the “New South” for 10 years. He is married, has one child, and lives and works in southern Maine.
About the Publication of Reaching Home and Resilience Training
Since its release in October of 2006 Reaching Home has been a tool for teaching resilience through storytelling. Through the Maine Resilience Program, the novel has been used to teach the skills and attitudes of resilience to University resident assistants, residents of elderly housing and their staff, first responders (including police, fire and rescue), professional journalists, members of the disability community, Red Cross volunteers, public health personnel and the general public. The novel will be integrated with the Maine Resilience training guide, Duct Tape Isn’t Enough and a second printing will be rereleased in the Spring of 2009.