About this project
Note from the Author: Joining my wife and our 9th grade daughter in the Women’s March in San Francisco, on January 21, 2017, abruptly opened my own eyes and ears to just how deep a divide had opened up in the country, and how quickly the fissure was threatening to expand around the world.
I originally set out to chronicle 2017, as it evolves, in a month-by-month collection of metaphor and verse that would take the lid off Washington and help entertain family and friends interested in following the cast of puppeteers now pulling the strings, many from behind the stage.
But the project quickly took on a life of its own. The resulting book, “Donald's Deadly Roller Coaster", is now working hard to be a simultaneously hilarious yet poignant exposé of the world’s newest “emperor sans clothes”, and to reach anyone struggling to find and raise their voice again in the age of Trump.
And the book has become very timely... from all corners of the country, and from many other countries as well, alarms are sounding in response to the Trump administration’s unhinged attacks on the press and any other critics. It is my hope that “Donald’s Deadly Roller Coaster” will prove to be as therapeutic to the voices of many, many other readers as it has been to me, and to my own family and friends! -DM
About the Book: The shock wave generated by the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States in November 2016 blasted out of the middle of the USA, swept left and right across the country, and then proceeded on to circle the globe. It left millions in its wake, from children and parents, students and teachers, to professionals, politicians, diplomats, world leaders, news anchors, and even late night comedians, all suffering from a complete and utter loss of words with which to comprehend and articulate “what the hell is going on?”. "Donald's Deadly Roller Coaster" is chronicling 2017 in a month-by-month collection of brilliant metaphor and ingenious verse that is guaranteed to cure even the most dumbstruck, and rescue anyone struggling to find and raise their voice again in the age of Trump.
The author, Scottish-born Duncan Malc (political humor pen name) is an MIT and Cornell trained scientist, engineer, and Silicon Valley entrepreneur. As a young boy, he emigrated with his family to Canada, where he was promptly diagnosed with a severely disruptive Scottish accent. However, neither the diagnosis nor the treatment burdened Duncan’s immigrant parents, thanks to Canada’s exceptional public schools and comprehensive healthcare system. In 1989, Duncan was a postdoctoral researcher in Germany when the Berlin Wall fell, as a result of which he finds recent zealotry for building walls, never mind demonizing immigrants, public schools, or universal healthcare, to be fundamentally misguided. Widely published in leading scientific and engineering journals, and winner of multiple awards for his scientific achievements, Malc's illuminating lectures, boisterous songsmanship, and rollicking verse have brought crowds to their feet around the world.
In “Donald’s Deadly Roller Coaster”, Duncan Malc harnesses his own early speech challenges and deep technical skills to engineer the English language into a potent antidote designed to help millions of dumbstruck people around the world find and raise their voices again in the age of Trump. Written with the rigorously factual approach of a scientist, and embellished with the sober wit of a man who met his Swiss wife Anna after winning a blindfolded Scotch-tasting competition at a Burns Supper high in the Swiss alps, Malc’s first literary venture delivers a simultaneously hilarious yet poignant exposé of the world’s newest “emperor sans clothes”.
Here's the book's Table of Contents: (you can preview the first 3 chapters on Wattpad (https://www.wattpad.com/story/102134400-donald%27s-deadly-roller-coaster) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/Duncan_Malc). Please be sure to share or re-Tweet your favorite passages!):
August 2015 - December 2016: Prologue – Words Matter!
January 2017: Donald’s Deadly Roller Coaster
February 2017: The Genies’ Flask
March 2017: What (Political) Climate Change?
April 2017: Spheres, Pyramids, and Financial Geometry
May 2017: title TBD
June 2017: title TBD
July 2017: title TBD
August 2017: title TBD
September 2017: title TBD
October 2017: title TBD
November 2017: title TBD
December 2017: title TBD
Epilogue
*****
Risks and challenges
Honestly, at this point folks, "Donald's Deadly Roller Coaster" all but writes itself on a daily basis... my major challenge is deciding what events NOT to include in this month by month chronicle, to avoid rivaling the page count (>1400) of the original "War and Peace" (Tolstoy's). I'm aiming for a more modest 140 pages.
The risk that we wake up one day before the end of 2017 and discover that this particular episode in world history has run its course, and that there is suddenly nothing more to write about, is more than offset by the fact that what has already transpired could easily fill 1400 pages!
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