Senior Scribble Second Dose

ISBN-978-1-938101=91-5



December, 2013

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"If Senior Scribbles Unearthed were a car it would be a 1950's Nash Metropolitan --America's first sub-compact-- with a 2013 Corvette V-8 hidden inside.

"Chuck Thurston is one of those rare writers who, like Mark Twain, leads you off in one direction only to deliver you somewhere else, and it is always somewhere you find fascinating. Mostly you find it fascinating because, though Thurston seems to be writing about himself, he turns out to be writing about you. And doing so with such generous respect for the reader that you feel both welcome and in awe, as though you've been invited into someone else's home, and through its windows is new world.

"These short pieces, collected from Thurston's columns in a North Carolina weekly, quietly demonstrate that ambiguity is not ambivalence, that it is indeed possible to hold two opposing opinions and cherish them both. This is because Thurston is a master of perspective who refuses to make the kind of cheap judgements that are the specie of our time. In one brief chapter, writing about his father-in-law, Thurston manages to be both admiring and condemning, a balancing act so foreign to 21st-century America that it should be taught as a mandatory subject in the public schools. Another writer would have painted his subject in black; Thurston does not cop out and paint him gray, but --take your pick-- black with white stripes or white with black.

"In the same manner, these pieces redefine nostalgia, which is normally presented in print as a treacly memorial to the better that once was. Thurston gently poo-poos this, demonstrating that the only value of the past is to bring value to the present and, rather subtly, to point to a future we need not fear.

"This then is the book you buy for a cynical friend who sees no value other than survival, and it is the book you buy for yourself when you realize your friend is not alone. Senior Scribbles Unearthed is not an emotional how-to, one of those instant best-sellers that promise success and fulfillment in ten easy lessons. It is a why to. Through laid-back humor and the sense that only what is important is important, Chuck Thurston manages to shine a gentle light on his life. That brightness illuminates ours."