Tales from America's Golden Age

How does a white male Christian escape the confines of being born to privilege?

This book is an impressionist memoir. Its many short and very short stories stand alone like many-colored daubs of pigment on an impressionist's canvas. But if you step back and view them as a whole, they become a portrait of a guy who has lived along the privilege spectrum during a shining stretch of America's sprawling saga, from World War II until the huge transfer of wealth to the top 1% from the rest of us that began during the Reagan Administration.

A sampling:

• Making mischief at Harvard

• World War II touches Brooklyn

• Serving in the Army of Occupation in Germany during the Cold War

• The skinny on the innards of a major Wall Street law firm

• A prosecutor blows the whistle on the sham prosecution of police who perpetrated the 1971 Attica prison massacre; he pays the price and reaps

unexpected rewards

• The single-parent social scene in Fairfield County, CT, during the flowering of women's lib in the 1970s

• Co-raising a girl and boy as the parent without custody

• Risking prison to protect Salvadorans and Guatemalans from being summarily sent to the death squads they had fled

• Standing with four valiant and determined women in their quest for peace and justice