About the Story: The Good Guy Wears a Hook
Dr. Lee Brazil, a “southern refugee,” 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: A Psychologist with a Disability
Dr. Ron Breazeale, a psychologist with over 30 years of clinical experience in the field, has written extensively in the field of psychology. Reaching Home is written about the things that he knows. He 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. Throughout his career, Dr. Breazeale has focused much of his clinical practice and his writing on persons with a disability and their families. He is married, has one child, and lives and works in southern Maine.
About the Publication of Reaching Home
Reaching Home was released on October 31, 2006. Over the next year a national marketing campaign is planned. It will include an author tour and workshops on a number of the issues the novel explores, including: including the disabling effect of fear on an individual and their society and the attitudes and skills that build resilience.
If you would like to learn more about group discounts and fund-raising opportunities, please see this page on the site.
About Using Storytelling to Teach Resilience
Duct Tape Isn't Enough, a Readers and Resilence Coaches’ Guide to Reaching Home, assists individuals and groups in using the book to learn and teach the attitudes and skills that build resilience. We would like to see Reaching Home used in disability studies programs and in disaster preparedness training. The Guide can be downloaded from this website at no charge.