Important Post
"Of the World" is the second book of the groundbreaking coming of age trilogy "If Where You're Going Isn't Home," the ten-year story of a boy growing up Mormon in America in pursuit of a dream to play jazz trumpet.
At sixteen, licensed to drive, armed with his trumpet and a talented band, Shake Tauffler begins to slip the harness of his home and neighborhood to test himself in the raw world of the streets and nightclubs of Salt Lake and its outlying towns. His threatened parents intensify their attacks on his emerging sexual and moral consciousness. Jazz and its negro heroes still define him, but his church takes off its gloves to teach him that in God’s eyes Negroes are anything but heroes. His Huck Finn days are over; this is the rebel Shake, conflicted, haunted by the faceless mystery of never being good enough and a hunger he can’t name, roaming the night alone or with his hoodlum pals, looking for refuge in hot cars, chance girls, violence, the cry of his trumpet, the faces of the American night.
In the epic second book of the trilogy "If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home," the Shake we knew in "Journey" takes on tougher obstacles, extends his reach, but continues to meet the senseless forces of his life with courage, wit, and wonder. He leaves Utah to become a tanker in the Army where he embraces the break from his past and the chance to define himself from scratch. But his past comes out of hiding when he falls in love with a breathtaking girl and comes face to face with the ruthless racial dogma of his faith. He returns home, a man and a hero, to a family and church who are quick to remind him who and where he is. A foreign mission when he turns nineteen lies just ahead. The road is ending. One last defiant self-affirming act takes him across the American West to close it down his way.
From Michael Strong, co-founder and COO of Zola Books:
“Max Zimmer has written the Great American Mormon Novel. For decades, readers have depended upon a few extraordinary writers to understand fully what it means to be an American – Philip Roth, Julia Alvarez, Ralph Ellison, Erica Jong, John Updike. Zimmer has added a critical new dimension to our shared national understanding of who we are and how we got here in this sweeping narrative. Twelve-year-old Shake Tauffler’s decade-long journey through the Mormon Church and beyond will resonate with all Americans who ponder their soul and place in our changing national portrait.”
At sixteen, licensed to drive, armed with his trumpet and a talented band, Shake Tauffler begins to slip the harness of his home and neighborhood to test himself in the raw world of the streets and nightclubs of Salt Lake and its outlying towns. His threatened parents intensify their attacks on his emerging sexual and moral consciousness. Jazz and its negro heroes still define him, but his church takes off its gloves to teach him that in God’s eyes Negroes are anything but heroes. His Huck Finn days are over; this is the rebel Shake, conflicted, haunted by the faceless mystery of never being good enough and a hunger he can’t name, roaming the night alone or with his hoodlum pals, looking for refuge in hot cars, chance girls, violence, the cry of his trumpet, the faces of the American night.
In the epic second book of the trilogy "If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home," the Shake we knew in "Journey" takes on tougher obstacles, extends his reach, but continues to meet the senseless forces of his life with courage, wit, and wonder. He leaves Utah to become a tanker in the Army where he embraces the break from his past and the chance to define himself from scratch. But his past comes out of hiding when he falls in love with a breathtaking girl and comes face to face with the ruthless racial dogma of his faith. He returns home, a man and a hero, to a family and church who are quick to remind him who and where he is. A foreign mission when he turns nineteen lies just ahead. The road is ending. One last defiant self-affirming act takes him across the American West to close it down his way.
From Michael Strong, co-founder and COO of Zola Books:
“Max Zimmer has written the Great American Mormon Novel. For decades, readers have depended upon a few extraordinary writers to understand fully what it means to be an American – Philip Roth, Julia Alvarez, Ralph Ellison, Erica Jong, John Updike. Zimmer has added a critical new dimension to our shared national understanding of who we are and how we got here in this sweeping narrative. Twelve-year-old Shake Tauffler’s decade-long journey through the Mormon Church and beyond will resonate with all Americans who ponder their soul and place in our changing national portrait.”
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