Year of the Monkey (ePub)

Ron Argo has been a psych-ward aide, a photographer, a Florida Keys boat captain, an award-winning newspaper reporter, a combat correspondent in LBJ's war, a plumber, carpenter, electrician, all-around jack and restorer of old houses, a would-be musician and artist who can no longer play a guitar with the arthritis. He holds three degrees to include journalism, literature and the MFA; he's gone to jail a time or two in his reckless youth but never had to post bail, been a voter in all elections, except when in Vietnam where the thought was ludicrous. He was never a bartender or preacher. Nor did he ever hold political office, if you don't count chairing a citizen's committee appointed by a board of supervisors to fight corruption over animals, and whose prize-winning newspaper series on that subject helped created the first low-cost spay and neuter clinics in a Southern California city.
He has published one of the more important American war novels of the last century, an epic that one acclaimed critic/academic compared to the works of Mailer, Dos Passos, Jones and Crane.
Argo's only been married twice, so he has no pressing momentum for pumping out promoting book after book, as some novelists must to do to support ex spouses, etc. He has a working, caring wife to assure his maintenance and thus survival.
He is however the author of these fine, award-winning historical and thriller novels, Year of the Monkey, Baby Love, The Courage to Kill and The Sum of His Worth. Other works are in his head and perhaps going down on paper soon as he picks himself up and gets back in the game.
Argo and spouse Mary--children having flown the nest--live in a small and snug community in San Diego where, like Voltaire, he's been there, learned some lessons and now tends his garden.