Waltz of the Innocents

About the Book

     Waltz of the Innocents paints a bittersweet life on a huge canvas as Marsh Bretz blunders through the social movements of the late Twentieth Century.

    The shrewd country boy with deep German-speaking Russian background yearns for a wife and children bound together by love, tolerance and understanding. Yet, Marsh likes strong empowered women, his equals. Disregarding conflicts with his lovers´ and wives´ career and personal priorities, he stubbornly remains a tolerant man in an intolerant time, a doubter in the land of the true believer. And yet his chaotic personal life and thwarted goals has a strange vitalizing effect.

     Too frugal to buy clothes that fit, the good-hearted man uses every opportunity, every good gamble, to turn life´s losses into unexpected gains. Bailing a friend out of trouble, Marsh begins his first company-and then another. One way or other, the opportunist turns flaming wrecks into marshmallow roasts. Feminism, litigation, environmental disaster--all deal him setbacks. Yet if life flattens Marsh to the wall, Marsh takes the wall in compensation, and makes a good profit.

     Alternately amusing in his bumbling naiveté and sardonic humor, gentle and thoughtful in his ill-planned affairs and marriages, and grim and cold-blooded when antagonized--Marsh reflects the moral turmoil of the times. His quest for his family and his values carries him from well-to-do life in Montreal, Denver and Saint Petersburg to the lonely starkness of the Canadian Arctic, the gold mining gulags of Siberia and to his family´s farm on the lower Volga. Business, politics and personal life blur. Yet his stubborn quest will never end until the goal is achieved.

About the Author

Graduating from Columbia University and University of Illinois, Gary Horton worked as a geologist and executive for the Department of the Interior. Environmental protection, public participation, computer breakthroughs, women’s rights and equal employment opportunity, downsizing—the world continually churned with revolutions in social structure and personal life. Whether strolling thoughtfully on the sea ice off Alaska’s Point Barrow, waiting uncomfortably to testify before a Senate committee, or shouting bleary conversation through the heat and din of a French Quarter jazz joint, the subject was always the same—how do we get through the latest mess? So, with Waltz of The Innocents, the author asks, “Can an imperfect man dream his dreams and fulfill his family traditions in the world of the self-righteous? Of course, there’ll be adjustments, not all exactly legal. But with wink and a tip of the glass, the hero could tell you that winning was made for rogues. The path to righteousness isn’t always straight when we’re lost.