Autobiography – education and deconstruction.com

My American Dream

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The Book of the Week is “My American Dream, My True Story As An Undocumented Immigrant Who Became A Wall Street Executive” by Julissa Arce, published in 2016.

The author was born in 1983 in Taxco, Mexico. In 1994, she moved with her parents to San Antonio, Texas on a tourist visa. Because she was going to school (a private one) she was actually living in the U.S. illegally. Her parents (who were legal immigrants) didn’t understand the implications of such a situation. They simply wanted her to get a good education. Americans’ tax dollars weren’t even paying for it.

The upshot, though, was that Arce never got a Social Security Number, and couldn’t get any kinds of government or financial services: healthcare, a driver’s license, a bank account, or financial aid when she applied to go to college.

By living in the United States, Arce’s foreign status became her single biggest life-problem, especially when she was in her late teens. That problem led to others. If she moved back to Mexico, she most likely would be unable to return to the United States for at least ten years, unless laws changed.

Arce needed to earn “off the books” money to support her family, and pay her mother’s medical bills. On top of that, she had a drunk, abusive father. She was accepted to a college at the last minute, based on academic and student-participatory merit, and thanks to a new Texas state law. As is well known, many students are accepted to schools based on “legacy” or alumni-bribery practices, or on athletic rather than academic merits.

After many more hardships, the author got a job in the real world. She initially omitted the inconvenient fact that fake identity papers would allow her to work at the job only until she got caught for having a fraudulent Social Security Number. It appears that both her employer and the IRS turned a blind eye to her situation, as the former was able to pay her less than it would a non-foreign employee. BUT her employer was still withholding taxes from her paycheck. So why should her employer fire her? She was a model worker. She had to be– she was under the constant threat of deportation. She had to try harder than everyone else to please everyone.

Fortunately, several people in Arce’s life gave her good advice:

get the best education she could;
always strive do be the best at whatever she did– regardless of what it was;
be persistent;
associate with the appropriate people;
be professional at all times; and
continually socially network.

Arce was actually a shameless social climber, but she also showed she was a team player– unselfish with her time and talents. When the author achieved the pinnacle of what she perceived to be success, she wrote, “I felt normal– just another drunk Wall Street analyst on Stone Street on a Friday night.” And yet, she realized she still wasn’t truly happy.

Read the book to learn much, much more about Arce’s life experiences, and additional (true!!!) information (not emotionally-charged political propaganda) about immigrants in America.

Nerves of Steel

The Book of the Week is “Nerves of Steel, How I Followed My Dreams, Earned My Wings, and Faced My Greatest Challenge” by Tammie Jo Shults, published in 2019.

The author, born at the dawn of the 1960’s, grew up in New Mexico and Colorado. For two years, military men in the recruitment offices of the Air Force and Navy told her she wasn’t allowed to become a pilot in their services because she was female. That was a lie. In March 1985, she was (finally!) inducted into the Navy, due to her chance meetings with honest men. She graduated near the top of her training class. Of course.

Shults was passionate about and good at, piloting aircraft, but she had to endure numerous indignities and conditions perpetrated by her bosses that were even more life-threatening than they should have been, because she was female. She was cool under fire, and her Christian faith saw her through those stressful and traumatic times of her life. Strangely, a religious quote in her book indicated she believed her God is a male!

Anyway, after her Navy service, she transferred her super flying skills to a job fighting wildfires in California. In the mid-1990’s, she learned to fly a piston-engine plane (different from the military aircraft she had been flying). She engaged in surveillance missions to alert firefighters and others on the ground to situations that were more dangerous than usual; dispensed red mud to put out the fires; and spread fertilizer so as to facilitate the growth of new vegetation.

The third leg of the author’s piloting career involved getting a job at a commercial airline. The GI Bill paid for her training in a 737 jet. Compensation and benefits for women in the military and pilots’ union are equivalent to the mens’, but in some quarters, women are still treated as second-class citizens by men who don’t like “girls” to invade their fraternity.

Infuriatingly for American women, Congress is still one such place where there are a bunch of powerful men, so even if a female were to be elected president, those men would automatically smear her, and vote against everything she did.

As is well known, presidents have had to make serious compromises in civil-rights legislation in order to further their own mandates. Attitudes are very, very difficult to change, as almost every facet of American life began with a bunch of white alpha males:

the Founding Fathers;
Wall Street;
the military and law enforcement;
professional sports;
science and technology;
business and industry;
most of the licensed professions, etc.,

except for areas involving family, household chores and jobs in the arts and entertainment.

So it should not have been surprising that the author encountered yet more gender discrimination with her new employer– in the late 1990’s. Read the book to learn much, much more about Shults’ ordeals and triumphs that show that America is making slow, slow progress in workplace gender equality. Unfortunately, not fast enough for politics. Not yet.

As is well known, in the 1960’s, there were impatient civil-rights activists who believed that resorting to violence would facilitate the enactment of equality-legislation. After the American Civil War to date, white males have threatened and resorted to violence in order to hinder the enactment of equality-legislation.

Not to worry. There is still plenty of time for progressive historical events this election season. Currently, it’s like the start of the fourth quarter of football games, but fans, like voters, need only check the last five minutes of the games to see the winners. Turning off the idiot box for the next month will prevent a lot of emotional trouble. There’s no need to despair, as there might just be a quarterback such as Tom Brady who will step in late in the game. Thank goodness for the last minute. If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would ever get done.

Unhinged

The Book of the Week is “Unhinged, An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House” by Omarosa Manigault Newman, published in 2018.

Born in 1974 in Youngstown, Ohio, Omarosa grew up with hardships and deprivation, but with a large extended family. After she became a reality-show celebrity, a writer spied on her eulogizing at her brother’s funeral, and claimed to have exclusively interviewed her in a tabloid story. Omarosa sued because she never consented to an interview, and didn’t even know that a story would be written about her.

In November 2015, Donald Trump appeared as himself on Saturday Night Live, saying that when he was president, everything would be perfect. Of course. Once Trump won the election in November 2016, he lost his sense of humor, and all bets were off regarding his ability to laugh at himself.

Omarosa got caught up in Trump’s cult of personality. She failed to see his character flaws. She wrote of a cancelled March 2016 Chicago rally: “We blamed everything and everyone, except for Donald Trump. No one talked about what we could do to change him or his message. The divide in our nation was simply too big to bridge, even if the candidate wanted to (he didn’t). He relished the conflict.”

One of numerous reasons he won the 2016 election, however, was that he was generous to a handful of people in “protected groups” such as Omarosa, so he could claim he was non-discriminatory in his political practices. He showcased and bragged about this handful whenever possible, but he smeared those protected-groups as a whole, behind their backs.

In her one year working for president Trump, Omarosa was the intermediary communications officer between the U.S. government and organizations of people of color. Most of her time, however, was spent defending her boss and / or enabling him in his whitewashing of history. She did arrange a few meetings between him and the groups, but her biggest achievement was successfully reinstating Pell grants during the summer term (in addition to fall and spring terms) for financially-challenged students.

As have other Trump memoirists, Omarosa described a world in which the political, media and entertainment industries are so full of themselves and so self-absorbed, they think that whenever a big event is televised, the whole world is watching them and their commentary on themselves for at least a day. But the bulk of the idiot-box ratings and Web traffic are derived from their own viewership and workforces! It’s now a selfie-cycle, not a news cycle. But they do tease some viewers all the time on political goings-on. Fortunately, they can’t tease all viewers all the time.

Anyway, read the book to learn a boatload more about Omarosa’s employment experiences in the White House, outside it, and a bit about the rest of her life-history.

EPILOGUE

For now, here is what Trump is singing to his claques, flacks and sycophants in the legal arena.

YOU’RE SCARED OF ME

sung to the tune of “You’re Sixteen” with apologies to Ringo Starr.

You’re all part of my scheme,
my own legal team.
You’re nodding and winking in line.

You’re scared of me, you’re dutiful, and you’re mine.

You’re all making me king.
A wonderful thing.
Our enemies are in decline.

You’re scared of me, you’re dutiful, and you’re mine.

If you support me, we’re all set.
This is great. I’m glad we met.
I’ll pardon you.
I’m at the top.
Ooh, I’m so powerful, I cannot stop.

You’re fulfilling my dreams,
but now I need arms.
I’ve got the law on my side.

You’re scared of me, you’re dutiful, and you’re mine.

If you support me, we’re all set.
This is great. I’m glad we met.
I’ll pardon you.
I’m at the top.
Ooh, I’m so powerful, I cannot stop.

You’re fulfilling my dreams,
but now I need arms.
I’ve got the law on my side.
You’re scared of me, you’re dutiful, and you’re mine.

You’re scared of me, you’re dutiful, and you’re mine.

You’re scared of me, so dutiful, and you’re mine.

All mine, all mine, all mine…

Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms

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The Book of the Week is “Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms, My Life in American Politics” by Ed Rollins with Tom DeFrank, published in 1996.

Rollins’ parting comment as the book went to press was this:

“Genuine campaign finance reform will only occur through a constitutional amendment eliminating PACs and prohibiting wealthy individuals to spend their own fortunes.”

Born in Boston in 1943, Rollins spent most of his childhood in Vallejo, California. As a young adult, he channeled his anger into amateur boxing. One of his coaches steered him away from going pro.

Rollins thus turned to working in politics. As a child, he had been unduly influenced by the military presence in Vallejo. His pro-war stance caused him to switch from the Democrat to the Republican party. At the last college he attended, Chico State (in California), when the Vietnam War was raging, he actively lobbied to establish a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps branch on campus. Later on in his life, he enjoyed lots of food, drinks and entertainment, compliments of other lobbyists.

In 1981, with Lyn Nofziger as his mentor, Rollins’ job was to get Ronald Reagan’s proposed laws passed and begin the work required to get him reelected president. In February 1981, the author was told to help hush up a sex scandal in connection with one female lobbyist and approximately twenty(!) anxious Republican House representatives. There was videotape evidence.

Rollins and his colleagues helped plant a featured article about Reagan in, and his photo on, the cover of Parade magazine in December 1983. Such propaganda was meant to dispel concerns about Reagan’s age. He was seen exercising and appeared healthy.

Rollins described the dirty-tricks he encountered during his attempt to get Christie Whitman elected against incumbent James Florio, as governor of New Jersey in 1993. In October, Florio’s people had an 18-wheel truck follow Whitman’s bus tour of the state. Pursuant to the Whitman team’s plan, at a toll plaza, a car got in front of the truck and broke down– allowing the bus to lose the spying truck. Rollins claimed that Florio’s side retaliated by pulling the fire alarm at the hotel where Rollins’ team was staying, for two weeks, every night at 4:30am.

On election night about 10pm, when the candidates were neck and neck at the polls– the win/loss margin was fewer than ten thousand votes– Rollins consulted with Whitman’s election law specialist who knew ballot security. They sent in their lawyers and marshals to the precincts in major cities to prevent any foul play.

Read the book to learn much, much more about Rollins’ activities in American politics of the past (pre-Internet), and a fund-raising practice which was arguably a form of voter-suppression, that resulted in a scandal (Hint: It was sparked by Rollins when he accidentally allowed his mouth to speak his subconscious thoughts; perhaps his conscience was bothering him).

Red China Blues

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The Book of the Week is “Red China Blues, My Long March From Mao to Now” by Jan Wong, published in 1996.

Born in 1952, Wong grew up in Montreal. Since her parents were originally from China, she went to search for her roots there, beginning when she was in college. She spent her three-month 1972 summer vacation in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards ransacked temples and burned books, painted walls red, and posted Mao’s quotations. Chinese natives had severe shortages of consumer goods, which were exported for hard currency.

The author was assigned a minder (supervisor / spy) and a driver. The unwashed masses were squashed into noisy trams while top government officials rode around in red-flagged limousines whose windows were covered in gauze.

Wong was taken somewhere different every day, such as the Canton zoo, or the countryside. The latter was ninety miles away from Beijing. To get there, she had to take an overcrowded bus with live chickens, plus a six-hour ride on three ferries.

Fresh-faced, earnest, brainwashed cultists (Chinese youths) put on a show for Wong (a special foreign visitor). She had arrived fresh-faced and earnest, and became a brainwashed cultist herself. The most prominently featured book at the bookstore was Selected Works of Mao Zedong in various languages.

Wong became a lucky beneficiary of Mao’s campaign to open up China economically and culturally. As is well known, American president Nixon opened the door for economic benefits. The author got permission to study the Mandarin language at Beijing University. She and her dorm-mate, another foreigner, were treated like princesses rather than common Chinese peasants.

Even so, the author acquired the martyr complex of true Mao worshippers– she was eager to go to the countryside to do hard manual labor. She did, but she saw that her fellow workers had gotten tired of the leaders’ hypocrisy, and the deprivation suffered by, and oppression of ordinary Chinese people.

Mao’s latest nationwide political program was winding down. His anti-education mandate was changing. His minions began to encourage school attendance, but there was rote learning, which still put the kibosh on independent thinking. The goal of the Communists was to produce blindly obedient robots who could recite Marx, Engels , Lenin, Stalin and of course Mao, verbatim.

In the early 1980’s with a new leader, China caught the capitalism bug. But there was still loads of corruption. The government still oppressed ordinary Chinese people. Even though the author was a Canadian expatriate, she looked Chinese, so this actually gave her a distinct advantage as a journalist for a Canadian newspaper. She was able to gain the trust of the people she questioned.

Nevertheless, even the author suffered an outrageous incident: “The police not only didn’t apologize, they announced they would keep our car another month… on June 5, 1990, we got our Toyota back, a year less a day after the police had stolen it. The gas tank was empty, the odometer was broken, the cigarette lighter was gone, and cigarette butts and popsicle sticks littered the interior.”

The author acquired direct experience in two economically and politically diverse environments over the course of decades– Canada and China. By the end of the 1970’s, she had become disillusioned with the workers’ paradise, but didn’t regret the education she got.

Wong saw how, into the 1990’s, Beijing’s roads became clogged with luxury vehicles, as the new rich sought to keep up with the Joneses. At the book’s writing, she could identify dogma and hated it. She believed in dignity and building resilience through experiencing hardship. She contended that rational thought should be sufficiently simple to explain to a five-year old.

Read the book to learn of many other experiences in the author’s life, and of the major late-1980’s historical event the author witnessed, that showed that China was still not ready to join the modern nations of the world that practiced democracy and rule of law.

Will

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The Book of the Week is “Will” by Will Smith with Mark Manson, published in 2021.

Born in September 1968 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Will described in detail what he learned from the people in his life, from the cradle onward. His life has not always involved the wealth and privilege conveyed in his hit song, “Parents Just Don’t Understand.”

Smith related anecdotes in which, like his father– he displayed poor impulse control. Smith’s father could be a mean drunk, while he himself sublimated the traumas he experienced from his family’s dysfunctionality through constant goal-oriented activity.

If Smith took even a short break from his fantasy life, and later, his working life, he would be forced to acknowledge other people’s emotions and possibly even face his own shortcomings. So he laser-focused on competing to be the best at whatever he was doing, in completing a mission.

The lowest point in Smith’s existence came in the early 1990’s, when he was saddled with crushing debt load. To make matters worse, his association with gang members posed a life-threatening situation. Law enforcement had caught up with them. Smith got in trouble when a friend protected him with a knockout punch to his attacker: “But as I sat in that jail cell, facing aggravated assault, criminal conspiracy, simple assault, and reckless endangerment charges for a punch I hadn’t even thrown…” He obviously grew from experience, but didn’t elaborate further.

Smith earned bragging rights for making movies that allegedly made more money than any other Hollywood actor’s movies, including Tom Cruise’s; he spent a longer amount of time than anyone else in promoting his movies in foreign countries, and performing in free concerts for his fans.

Read the book to learn many more details about: Smith’s childhood, the people who guided his careers, his wrongheaded notions that led to love-life failures, and some of his misbehaviors and extraordinary achievements.

I Should Have Honor

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The Book of the Week is “I Should Have Honor, A Memoir of Hope and Pride in Pakistan” by Khalida Brohi, published in 2018.

Pakistan’s Muslim men have a tradition of arranging marriages for their prepubertal daughters to clans they deem worthy. None of the female family members have any say in the matter.

It was through a stroke of great good luck that Grohi’s father (born in the mid-1970’s) received an education, instead of facing a fate of ignorance, poverty, goat-herding and hard manual farmwork as his siblings did. Too, the author won the “world parents lottery” in many ways. Her father refused to agree to marry her off before she was born (!) Her parents provided the same resources and opportunities to her and her sisters, as to her brothers. She attended school and was allowed to do almost anything her male counterparts were allowed to do.

The author was born in the late-1980’s, although when she began to travel internationally, her later-created identity documents were inaccurate by about a year. She became fluent in English and Brahui. During her childhood, her financially struggling, ever-growing family moved around a lot. At first, they lived in multi-generational households in rural villages and later on, upgraded to the cities of Hyderabad and Karachi.

Even so, Grohi’s mother and females in her large extended family were still enslaved in a life of domestic chores, which included feeding their farm animals and making cow-dung patties to be burned in cooking-fires. In other words, in most Pakistani Muslim households, the females were kept barefoot and pregnant.

On an even more extreme note, in the single-digit 2000’s (!) the males were allowed to physically abuse their wives (for any reason they rationalized, or none at all), and allowed to kill a female who brought shame to the family through misbehavior such as eloping. The latter situation occurs about a thousand times a year in Pakistan. Gossiping is the number one activity in rural-village communities, so everyone was under pressure to conform to the elder males’ rules.

The author realized that religion, caste or tradition had nothing to do with how such a punishment was justified. The elders were simply alpha males with hubris syndrome who were insecure, or enraged at the disobedience of their daughters. Grohi tried to change that. She founded a non-profit organization that empowered females by spurring discussions in Pakistan and internationally regarding gender equality. After much trauma, she was forced to switch to a less confrontational approach– by apologizing to the males, and convincing them:

that physically harming females was dishonorable;
that allowing female family members to work outside the home would financially help the household (and for that, they might need education), and
that the points above were their idea.

Read the book to learn an additional slew of information on the author’s family, and her trials, tribulations and triumphs in trying to change Pakistan’s entrenched gender-segregated, cruel culture.

My Race

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The Book of the Week is “My Race, A Jewish Girl Growing Up Under Apartheid in South Africa” by Lorraine Lotzof Abramson, published in 2010.

Born in March 1946, the author grew up in Orange Free State in South Africa. Her ancestors were originally from Latvia. Many other fair-skinned people (hereinafter called “whites”) were descended from British settlers. The Afrikaners (descended from Dutch settlers) were the country’s ruling majority. They imposed apartheid beginning in 1948. They interpreted the Christian Bible in a way that depicted dark-skinned Africans (called Africans; hereinafter called “blacks” but the derogatory term is Kaffirs) as servants. All white families had sufficient wealth to employ at least one (black) servant.

The black population way outnumbered that of the white. The Afrikaners felt extreme pressure to oppress the blacks unmercifully, lest they revolt against any and all whites. The Jews were thus largely left alone. The author was the only Jew in her elementary school. She showed natural running ability at an early age, and after collecting a bunch of victories in footraces, she became a source of local pride for the community. So she was tolerated, even though she was Jewish.

In August 1961, the author was chosen to represent her homeland of South Africa in the Maccabi Games, a competition for Jews held in Israel. She met athletes of all different nationalities, including surprisingly, an Indian Jew. Under apartheid in South Africa, simply having a conversation with an Indian (or any non-fair-skinned person) was a crime, in public or in private.

The South African government used a divide-and-conquer strategy, outlawing assembly of ten or more individuals of dark-skinned tribes. The government fomented hatred of one tribe against another. Signs saying, “Whites Only” or “Non-Whites” were posted in all public places to indicate who was allowed where and what they could do. Whites would be arrested for entering a place bearing the “Non-Whites” sign. The police kept photos of protest-marchers (troublemakers– including whites). A person of any skin color who criticized the government would be punished.

In 1991, after serving 27 years in prison, (black political activist) Nelson Mandela was elected leader of South Africa. The whites were deathly afraid the blacks would wreak revenge against all whites. Mandela was forgiving, and didn’t hold a grudge against his oppressors. But he could’ve– as happened in previous decades when various other African countries achieved independence and a black person became the top leader. The South African whites were relieved as hell.

Read the book to learn much more about the author’s life and times and places.

A Refugee’s American Dream

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The Book of the Week is “A Refugee’s American Dream, From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to the U.S. Secret Service” by Leth Oun with Joe Samuel Starnes, published in 2023. The book appeared to be credible although it lacked Notes, Sources, References, or Bibliography and an index.

Leth was born in October 1966 in northwestern Cambodia. He lived in a Buddhist neighborhood of seven households; it was communal, and living conditions were primitive. But his parents believed in education. Leth’s school was a half-hour’s walking distance. He began attending at six years old. The most excitement the peasants had was provided by a neighbor in the wider community. That wealthy family had a home entertainment system consisting of a screen and projector that showed Charlie Chaplin films with French subtitles.

Up until spring 1975, when extreme political turmoil turned his life upside down, Leth was allowed to bring his pet dog with him to see Cambodian and Chinese movies in a theater in Battambang City, near his home village. When the war came to his area, he saw “helicopters shooting fireballs from the sky, trees burning and exploding, trying to kill the Khmer Rouge soldiers in hiding.”

The Khmer Rouge guerrillas committed unspeakable atrocities, dubbed the “Killing Fields” by Western historians, but there was much was more to it than simply torturing and killing people in fields. Westerners who call mass deaths in modern times the “Killing Fields” are just as ignorant about world history as those who call certain leaders “Hitler” when they have no clue what they’re talking about.

Most Khmer Rouge foot soldiers were teenage boys toting AK-47’s. They were bossy and sadistic, like Nazis. The difference was, though, that Cambodia’s new dictator, Pol Pot, took lessons from Stalin’s and Mao Tse Tung’s Communist playbooks through: redistributing property to the government; turning the entire common population into peasant-farmers; and punishing everyone who had previously engaged in capitalism-related activities. They imposed an anti-intellectual godless regime that demonized all things Western. Most of his life, the author’s father had been (not by choice) in the Cambodian military, so he was doomed to be taken away and killed by the Khmer Rouge.

Obviously, the author lived to tell his tale, but he barely survived. At one point, he lived in a refugee camp, which he described thusly: “More huts were built in the dirt of the sprawling community surrounded by barbed wire beneath the mountain. The lines for food and water grew longer and slower. The latrines grew more crowded and smelled terrible.”

Read the book to learn many more details of the fate of the author and his family.

The Longest Race

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The Book of the Week is “The Longest Race, Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike’s Elite Running Team” by Kara Goucher with Mary Pilon, published in 2023.

Born in 1978, the author grew up in New Jersey and the Duluth, Minnesota area. Goucher became a professional runner. Like many of her fellow athletes, the author– who experienced an early childhood trauma– found at a young age that competing in footraces is cathartic.

Goucher focused on her training and reaching the finish-line first, rather than getting all worked up about the numerous stressful situations she endured in everyday living. However, she rationalized away some of the wrongs committed against her, because speaking out against them would ruin her career, her marriage, her friendships, etc.

In the United States, the way runners go professional is to convince a corporate, non-governmental sponsor to pay them to race. Goucher and her husband both signed contracts with Nike, the monster-sized corporation best known for making athletic shoes. The company provided her and her fellow runners in her working group with the best, cutting-edge scientifically and technologically advanced resources for winning races.

However, the Gouchers’ status with Nike was as independent contractors, so they had less legal recourse than that of employees with regard to any illegal goings-on in their field of work. Their coach and immediate boss was the celebrity runner Alberto Salazar. In the single-digit 2000’s, he led the “Oregon Project” which was an attempt to help Americans win races again around the world; their victories had been woefully plummeting for years.

Salazar did boost Kara’s confidence and helped her perform better than she thought she could. But, his behavior and many of his training practices were inappropriate and illegal. He and his colleagues (an alleged psychotherapist and medical doctor) wielded a lot of power over the Gouchers, who owed their careers to their sponsor. Salazar’s underlings hewed to his training methods through fear and force. “He [Salazar] got testy when called out for having a third drink. I could only guess how he would react to being called out about sexual harassment.”

As a female, Kara had to deal with Nike’s double standard of suspending her pay when she ran an insufficient number of races in a specified time period pursuant to her contract. Male runners were punished this way when they got caught in doping scandals or had injuries. She was subject to those same conditions, but she couldn’t race because she was pregnant. In connection with exploring her career options, Kara wrote, “… I found myself again and again in rooms of male executives explaining women’s running to me. There seemed to be more interest in how I would look on a poster than in how the sport could evolve.”

Fighting “City Hall” in so many different areas of life is difficult. Anyone who attempted to do so in professional running in the single-digit 2000’s would have to deal with Nike. It held a near-monopoly with overwhelming power and influence over regulators. Whistleblowers would suffer doxing and death threats.

BUT, it is an age-old truism that when more and more courageous people come forward with firsthand information about wrongdoing by an institution or a particularly powerful individual– the less the harm that will be done in the future because the collective mood of the community will shift against the wrongdoer. Eventually.

Read the book to learn lots of additional details of the Gouchers’ experiences in their professional running careers– their trials, tribulations and triumphs.