A New Series: One Minute Reviews of
Books by Vermont Authors
Laura's column "One Minute Reviews" has appeared bi-weekly in Wilmington, Vermont's Deerfield Valley News since 2015. In April 2018, she found that no Vermont periodical consistently reviews all commercially published fiction and non-fiction by Vermont authors, so she started a series to fill that void. Published reviews from that series and some earlier reviews of local authors are listed with links to a scan of the printed copy. Reviews still in queue are listed without links until they appear in print.
The books reviewed in this series are available through Wilmington's Pettee Memorial Library, the Whitingham Free Public Library, and locally owned Bartleby's Books in Wilmington.
Lyn Bixby, The Pacifist. Rootstock Publishing, 2026
This fast-paced historical thriller is set in 1968; it focuses upon protesters against the Vietnam war and the draft. As the book opens, Lisa Thompson, a back-to-the-lander bucking cordwood at her grandparents’ old Vermont farm, receives an unexpected visit from a man who calls himself Johnny Dollar. He’s a friend of her brother Chris, a leading figure in the Boston Draft Resistance. He tells her that Chris has recently hired Lincoln Freeman, a civil rights lawyer, to represent him in a challenge to the constitutionality of the draft. Since that action has almost certainly put Chris in the sights of J. Edgar Hoover, it’s probable that an FBI informer may soon accost Lisa in hopes of finding compromising information on the family. Johnny offers Lisa his phone number, in case that should happen. Surprised, but supportive of her brother, Lisa takes it. Ten days later, Chris is seriously injured after refusing induction at South Boston Army Base. Lisa hurries to Boston to be with him, but he dies without recovering from a coma. The Army report says he fell down the stairs. Lisa, her parents, and their supporters vow to find the truth.
The book’s complex plot unfolds in thirty-one chapters, dated chronologically and set in various areas of Boston and Vermont. Multiple, intersecting storylines allow Bixby to present the action from a wide variety of viewpoints, leaving it to the reader to link events, lies, betrayals and grossly illegal actions together in a way that puts Chris’s death in a larger context of immense power gone wrong. Helping Lisa and her family gather evidence about Chris’s murder is the tireless lawyer Lincoln Freeman, the mysteriously omnipresent Johnny Dollar, and the newly released Vietnam veteran Peter Ransom. Allied with them spiritually are Jud, a college graduate, and Bear, a teenaged Black musician, two smart-aleck draftees who become friends after they witness Chris’s defiance of the officer in charge of induction. Disgusted by what they see, they vow to unmask the army’s corruption and injustice from the inside, and over time begin an underground paper for their fellow soldiers to read. Around these characters are informants and various underworld characters whose status is not initially clear, making it necessary for readers to stay alert to the constant dangers posed by soldiers desperate to cover up drug smuggling, snitchers afraid of the power of their controllers, and crime figures whose corruption is secretly protected by the FBI.
Bixby is a Vietnam veteran who now lives in Vermont. Years ago, he was drafted right after he graduated from college, and he has written this book in memory of a classmate who was killed in the war. His anger at the horrors of the war and the corruption that accompanied it is clear—sometimes too clear—throughout the book. His writing occasionally leaves the realm of fiction and falls back on narrative techniques drawn from his long career as a journalist. But when he writes what he knows—the friendship of two draftees, the trust of ex-soldiers in each other, the disgusting whining of snitchers, the private horrors plaguing men whom war has made do unthinkable things—he is at his very best, and his book is a great read.