Review
A remarkable exercise in self-exposure. . . . The insights into the hero's motives and fears are honest and mortifyingly true. -- John Lazarus, CHQM-FM Radio (Vancouver), December 16, 1976
A story about a young man who doesn't grow up . . . emphasizes [the left's] robust capacity for sham, immaturity and factionalism. -- Dennis Duffy, Toronto Globe & Mail, June 12, 1976
Honest statement about the complexity of the feelings that caused [war resisters] to reject their homeland in the turbulent . . . Sixties. -- Jackie Hooper, Vancouver Province, October 4, 1976
A story about a young man who doesn't grow up . . . emphasizes [the left's] robust capacity for sham, immaturity and factionalism. -- Dennis Duffy, Toronto Globe & Mail, June 12, 1976
Honest statement about the complexity of the feelings that caused [war resisters] to reject their homeland in the turbulent . . . Sixties. -- Jackie Hooper, Vancouver Province, October 4, 1976
From the Inside Flap
When author Mark Satin left the United States to live in Canada in 1967 he was 20 years old. Nine years later his autobiographical novel traces the events which led him into his life as an exile with humor and remarkable honesty. More intrigued by the human comedy than the political realities of revolution, the authors explores the paths which led a midwestern boy from a middle-class family to become a draft dodger, possibly banished forever from the country where he hoped one day to build an "ideal city."
With aims set impossibly high, the hero stumbles into the Sixties, searching for principles to live by, girls to live with, and friends who can understand him. It is a search which will lead him into exile to the delight of his radical girlfriend and the dismay of the hero -- it wasn't what he'd planned or expected.
Confessions of a Young Exile is not so much a book about a draft dodger as a book about a whole generation motivated by reasons they only now can view with some detachment.
