Oct 20, 2022
peak with Bill Rivers about this novel, Last Summer Boys. The novel is about a rural Pennsylvania family and the adventures of three boys and a cousin and set in the tumultuous summer of 1968 with the Vietnam war, the assignations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
“Summer 1968. When thirteen-year-old Jack Elliot overhears the barbershop men grousing, he devises a secret plan to keep his oldest brother, Pete, from the draft. If famous boys don’t go to war, he’ll make his brother their small town’s biggest celebrity. Jack gets unexpected help when his book-smart cousin Frankie arrives in their rural Pennsylvania town for the summer. Together, they convince Jack’s brothers to lead an expedition to find a fighter jet that crashed many winters ago―the perfect adventure to make Pete a hero.”
We discuss a number of themes including
Family
Justice
Honor
Civil Society
Principle of Subsidiarity
Anger
Tensions between economic progress and family and social stability
Tensions between rural and urban communities
Writing and story development
Moral imagination
1968 Cultural and Sexual Revolutions
Alexis de Tocqueville
Robert Nisbet
Louis L’amour
Property
Crony capitalism, eminent domain and more
Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal
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