Management Research Associates Media Release
Vancouver, B.C. – Daytona Beach, Florida
January 23, 2015
Nobel Nominee Kevin Annett Publishes Explosive Novel
Samuel Wedge: Memoir of Necropolis
On the 20th Anniversary of his kangaroo court firing from the United Church of Canada, Reverend Kevin Annett has produced a blockbuster novel: an autobiographical treatment, emboldened by fiction, which reveals more than most people want to hear about Church, State and even judicial chambers.
To be released by AuthorHouse in Bloomington, Indiana next week, it will be in a bookstore near you shortly. In paperback, the cost is $19.95, and even cheaper in e-book format.
Salman Rushdie, in his Satanic Verses nearly 27 years ago, committed what was perceived as blasphemy in the Muslim world but – despite a fatwah amounting to a death sentence on his head issued by the Ayatollah Khoumeini – he was sheltered in the Christian world by right-thinking readers, U.K. officialdom and Scotland Yard bodyguards. He described his nervous subsequent years more recently in a fictionalized treatment, Joseph Anton, even as he became a literary lion in America and a favorite of both polite society and the literati.
Kevin Annett chose his giant adversaries wisely but too well, although unlike Rushdie, his was the wrong environment. As a United Church of Canada pastor in a half-native logging town on Vancouver Island in 1992, he uncovered evidence of atrocity suggesting genocide a hundred years in the making in an Indian “residential school” operated by his employer church. Ultimately revealing that the same brutal conditions had prevailed in similar “schools” across Canada, operated for a century by the three leading church organizations and the government, Kevin refused to remain silent, and as a result has seen his life trashed by the forces of church and state.
Samuel Wedge is the 30-year odyssey of a protagonist who leaves the sodden old-growth forest of British Columbia for the relative sanctuary of central Florida, alternately told by a sadder but wiser beachcomber harboring a terrible secret and, in his earlier configuration, a crusading young truth-teller confronting the most powerful people on the continent.
A tragedy brilliantly written with humor and compassion, the odyssey of Samuel Wedge is up-front, personal and not for kiddies or the faint of heart.
“In the councils of church and state,” writes reviewer Elizabeth Richeson, “and beyond – in the very boardrooms, the editorial offices and the judicial chambers of those who control today’s world – there is murderous injustice in the form of tiny crucifixions that routinely take place, never talked about – or even mentioned – in our carefully manicured society and our narrowly censored media. Samuel Wedge and his creator Kevin Annett have produced a bombshell with a delayed fuse that has been quietly igniting for more than 20 years.”
Kevin Annett was recently re-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by scholars in America and not, tellingly, by his own countrymen.
Kevin will be commencing a book and speaking tour across the world during February, 2015.
Advance autographed copies of Samuel Wedge can be ordered through Management Research Associates at hoople84@gmail.com .
See also www.KevinAnnett.com and www.itccs.org