Bill Jabanoski

Scarecrow Bill Jabanoski

The first chapters start out uproariously funny in Jabanoski's "gonzo" style as he describes how he, his brother and three others survive the Great New England Blizzard of 1978 in the hunt to get to "Slimy Dave's" bar in search of beer, but then the novel turns deathly serious when, twenty-five years later, Jabanoski finds himself reporting from the field on the invasion of Iraq. The parallels between the two stories, not readily apparent at first, come together forcefully as, in the death and devastation of a senseless war, the author realizes that what kept him and his friends alive in 1978 could keep us, as a society, alive today. The reporting from the war is uncompromisingly chilling and should be read by any student of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's lies of "weapons of mass destruction" and ties between the Iraqi government and 9/11 to force a war which benefited rich American corporate interests at the expense of tens of thousands of lives.