Click Here to order ...or get it through through your local bookstore.
The book tells the story of a group of American
men who happen to be priests
who happen to have served decades in American
prisons.
Darrell Rupiper, Larry Rosebaugh and Carl
Kabat are Oblate missionary priests.
Frank Cordaro is a diocesan priest from
Des Moines. Roy Bourgeois is a Maryknoll priest.
Charlie Liteky is an ex-Trinitarian priest.
Rupiper was in the national spotlight during
the Iran hostage crisis.
He traveled to Iran as part of team of
clerics hoping to gain the release of the hostages.
Rosebaugh now lives with the poor in El
Salvador. He was a member of the Milwaukee 14,
a group that burned draft records in accord
with the example set by the Berrigan brothers
at Catonsville, Maryland in 1968.
Kabat has served over 16 years in United
States federal and state prisons
since 1980 as a result of his anti-military
actions.
Cordaro has served half a dozen federal
prison terms for his anti-nuclear activities.
He has also given sanctuary to a manure
spreader in support of Iowa farmers. During the
Carter presidency Cordaro found himself
on the front page of the Washington Post after he
stood in front of Carter during a press
conference to tell the world the truth about the SALT treaty.
Bourgeois, from the deep south and a former
military officer who served in Vietnam, recently
made his own front-page news [NY Times,
Washington Post, others] as leader of the massive
protests at Fort Benning, Georgia calling
for the closing of the School of the Americas.
Bourgeois and Rosebaugh also served prison
terms in the 1980s when they sneaked into
Fort Benning, climbed a tree and played
a tape outside the Salvadoran soldiers' barracks
of the last sermon given by slain archbishop
Oscar Romero.
Liteky is a former chaplain who served in
Vietnam. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor,
and later surrendered it during his protests
at Fort Benning.
With the exception of Cordaro, all of these
men began their clerical careers as missionaries,
in Brazil, the Philippines, Bolivia and
Vietnam, and discovered America in the process.
They discovered that the trail of the poor
leads through such countries directly back to America.
It leads directly to Rupiper's home in
Carroll, Iowa; to Rosebaugh and Kabat's roots in rural Illinois;
to Cordaro's Des Moines Italian household,
and to the nation's capital, where Liteky was born.
They also discovered that the America they
grew up in never existed.
They read history and learned about America's
militarism, its attempts at global hegemony,
and they felt they must resist. They wanted
with all their hearts for their childhood America to be
made real, a just and loving America, even
if that meant they must spend years behind prison walls.
Click
Here to order ...or get it through through your local
bookstore.
Published by Algora of New York City.
Also by Mike Palecek:
KGB
by Mike Palecek
Fiction, published by Publish America of Baltimore.
Click book to order or through your local bookstore
"Joe
Coffee's Revolution"
To be released in the spring by Badger Books of Madison, Wisconsin.
A work of fiction based on Palecek's own
run for Congress as the Iowa
Democratic Party nominee in the Fifth District,
2000 election.
To pre-order, contact publisher Marv Balousek at books@badgerbooks.com.