Oh Beautiful...: Three Iconoclastic Novellas: "Memoirs of a Bitterly Cold War;" "Pimps, Pushers, Whores and Thieves;" and "Hearts and Minds."

"Oh Beautiful" is three heartfelt yet biting satirical and iconoclastic novellas ruminating the state of America’s empire post-World War II. The stories chronicle a once isolationist nation and its citizens as the country transforms itself into a vast empire -- a superpower. Each story has intricate insights weaving fact and fiction into three intimately personal stories about the emotional, mental and spiritual benefits and burdens of power, wealth, prosperity, and the quest for truth, virtue, honor, and love. "Memoirs of a Bitterly Cold War" follows “Samuel Haydn,” a boy who enlists in World War II as a wide-eyed 15-year-old anxious to distract himself from the death of his parents, and the loss of his first love. The story follows Haydn into the CIA after the war -- the greatest cataclysm in the country’s history -- where he quickly rises through the ranks of the most far reaching clandestine network in the world. Haydn has a hand in the overthrow of democratically elected governments, he assassinates world leaders, and initiates dissonance in anti-war and social movements. His deeds gain him respect, admiration, jealousy and resentment at the highest levels of the CIA. The burdens of power cause Haydn to come undone as he sacrifices everything including love, family, wealth, and veracity to protect an ideology he grows obsessed with.