Three Thumbs Up!

About the Book

A benighted Southern town summons the audacity to undertake a World´s Fair, with the help of a local bank brilliantly computer managed by a convicted embezzler.

Reflecting the community´s entitlement mentality and typical of its provincial university, mediocrities swarm to staff the fair. They sabotage talent above and suppress it below—a phenomenon familiar to anyone caught in an organization, large or small, that is suffocating in incompetence.

When the bank turns into a high-tech shell game and prominent locals invest in the cocaine trade, there is no beacon to shine into dark corners, for the hometown newspaper is part of the inbred hypocrisy.

Remus City, South Carolina, prefers to affirm its smugness in what it has always been, rather than explore what it might become.

In sharp contrast are a courageous woman and two uncommon men—the inseparable "oddest couple," determined to triumph despite all odds, standing three as one against the tide of conformity.

Their mutual salute: three thumbs up.

From impoverished childhood in a culture of denial and bigotry, where it is a sin to be different, to their battles as adults to live honorable lives in a stultifying environment riddled with self-delusion and arrogance, all they have in common is each other:

• Dynamic, beautiful Dorcas Bohannon, whose Irish Catholic passion and purpose can take her anywhere, if it is with the people she loves.

• Self-effacing Scotty MacGregor, raised as a Presbyterian, whose surgeon´s brilliance keeps lives as well as bodies stitched together with skill, empathy, and deep understanding of what is important in life.

• Loveable Jewish stammerer Benjy Dietz, a journalist who remembers what truth is about long after many in his profession have forgotten.

Into this backwater known as Remus City is drawn, as if by some irresistible magnet, a kaleidoscope of colorful, contrasting characters who alter it forever and capture the astonished attention of the world beyond.

Three Thumbs Up! is a tragic comedy of satire and wit, idiocy and hilarity, alienation and passion, insensitivity and poignancy, anguish and solace, death surmounted and love triumphant.

About the Author

John L. Perry is a prize?winning newspaper editor and reporter, a journalism graduate of Northwestern University. He served on two White House staffs, and is now a columnist for NewsMax.com. A corporate-affairs counselor, he was responsible for the 1982 World's Fair public relations. Three Thumbs Up! is his first novel. He recently published, through Xlibris, a book to assist parents telling children about adoption, Right to be Wanted, Right to be Loved. John and Mary Mayne Perry are retired, more or less, in their native Knoxville, Tennessee, epicenter of 11 grandchildren.