Please take time read the book review I have posted below that was published concerning The President's Parasite by Jim Musgrave. It gives a really good detailed look at the book and will help you appreciate the depth of the writer and the short stories he has woven into this very creative book. I think it will make you want to run out and get a copy of your own! I have also placed a short excerpt from the book to give you a taste of a creative and insightful book that will make you love the short story all over again.
- Author Steven Clark Bradley
The President's Parasite, Jim Musgrave resurrects all that has gone missing in today's literature: originality. The title story is a Kafkaesque piece from the point-of-view of an intellectual tapeworm trapped inside a moronic president, and the satirical impact is worthy of Swift. The other stories range from a widower trapped inside the Clock Tower in Baghdad that he constructed, to a baseball pitcher who becomes a living vegetable after a batted ball strikes his head. All in all, there is something for everyone in this collection of 30 eye-popping stories from a truly gifted author.
Ellen Hogan for Reader Views
The President's Parasite and Other Stories" is a compilation of lots of stories, some are cute, some are interesting and some you wonder why it was written. The stories really don't relate to one another in any way, so there is no real main theme.
These are three of the stories that I particularly liked:
This is the story of the first meeting of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. Did it happen this way, may be. The story goes that Joe was eating in a restaurant with an older man when a gorgeous young woman walked in and over to their table. The older man introduced them to each other and then left. They chit chat for a little while and then Mickey Rooney walks up to their table and Marilyn is quite impressed. However he wants to talk to Joe and is thrilled to meet his childhood idol. Then Marilyn asks Joe, "Don't you play some kind of sport?" He answers that he plays baseball for the Yankees. Finally Marilyn is impressed and tells Joe that she goes and visits her mother who is crazy every year and asks if he would like to go with her. She says "maybe she will recognize you. I guess you're the most famous baseball player in the world!" To which Joe answers "honey, there's one thing you have to learn. Me, you, everybody in the world. We're all special. I'm just one of them. I'm just Joe. But I'd love to go with you."
There was a man named Stan who loved to bet that people couldn't find things. The Tankard's Alehouse was where it all took place. First bet was for a hundred dollars to find someone wearing a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap. It must be on a citizen and this person must be a tourist. Mickey Arthur who had been a drunken loser before that day came running in with a young kid wearing the cap. The bets kept going on for over a month, then one day the bet was that they would find Stan's wife Angie from a picture he had. The third day of the bet Wally Chambers came into the bar with Angie.
She was surprised to see Stan and said she thought he was dead. He told her that he just wanted to see her one last time. Six months later Angie came in the bar with red swollen eyes, she was also pregnant. She told them that Stan had died from an inoperable brain tumor. She said he wanted to see her one more time before he went back to the hospital. Stan made one last bet in the V.A. Hospital; the wager was when the child would be born. He raised over eighty-thousand dollars. They asked what the winner got and she said to be her baby's namesake. Stan Burger was a real winner.
This is a story from Lee Harvey Oswald's perspective of the events of that November day. He picked his way through the stacks of textbooks, with a long brown wrapped object. He is by the window while he remembers the argument he had with Marina. Then he unwraps the 38-caliber, bolt action, single-shot Italian rifle. It was nothing like the M-1 automatic he had in the Corps. He spreads the ammo out on a long case of books. There is noise outside as the motorcade approaches. He grins as the cars go around the bend, they will pass under him and he is ready. "The years will remember this day-November 22, 1963--as the day Lee Harvey Oswald changed the course of human history." He shoots three times then stops to buy a coke so he will look cool. He dreams of being a hero in the Kremlin. He and Marina will ride down Red Square in a limo. "Every dog has its day, and Lee will be free in '63. Power to the people!"
There are many more stories in the book, some I thought were very good and others I didn't care for. It's for anyone interested in current events and also a little bit of history. Some of them are really thought-provoking.
I would recommend "The President's Parasite and Other Stories." Even though I didn't care for some of it, it was a good read.
Excerpt
When My Brother was a TV Channel
My brother, Lonnie, would later die from alcoholism, working as a bartender in San Francisco. Yet, once, when I was in high school, I was able to visit him at a happier time in his life. This was the time period he was doing his brief stint as a student at San Diego State University, and he was living with five other guys near the TV 39 transmitter out on Montezuma Road.
As I watched the sun going down, I wondered how these fellows were able to study. There was not a single lamp in the entire house! Suddenly, Lonnie came out of the back room with an armful of what looked like fluorescent bulbs. He placed them all around the room, like medieval candles, just the way he did when he was an altar boy at St. John’s when he was younger. He then squatted in the middle of the room and put himself into a full lotus.
“Come on over here and let me show you something cool,” he said, and I walked over, stooped down and took both of his outstretched hands.
“I’m a TV channel,” said Lonnie, and as I touched his hands, the room began lighting up, like the inside of a New Age church cathedral. “We don’t need electricity. More money for beer!” said Lonnie, and his long-hair was slung, from side to side, as he laughed. As I held my brother’s hands, the joy of his channeling radiated into me for the first and only time in our lives. Pictures of him torturing me with his variety of “practical jokes” whizzed past my mind’s eye like a cartoon, and I could laugh at them. I could see Lonnie downing a pint of whiskey that mother kept in her “Scottish nook” in our house on Coronado Island, and his sad blue eyes took in our parent’s divorce when he was fifteen and I was ten. Our sister, Louise, five, stood between us, also looking sad, first staring at Lonnie, and then back at me, as if she wanted us to become one of her television programs wherein families came together at the end of the half hour program. Instead, she would later retreat into books, become a librarian, and raise two children in Orange County. I would later finish my degree at U. C. Berkeley, serve in Vietnam, travel to India with my Dutch girlfriend, live on two different European communes, and finally become a ship’s carpenter in San Diego. Lonnie, however, was always a TV channel, broadcasting a different show to the variety of lonely people who visited him inside his tavern church in San Francisco. But, just as he would on the day I visited him on Montezuma Road near the TV transmitter, Lonnie finally gave up his broadcasting duties and gave up on life.
You can get your own copy of The President's Parasite by Jim Musgrave and learn a lot more about Jim Musgrave's writing by clicking the link below:
(Click Here) The President's Parasite by Jim Musgrave At Amazon.com
