A Portable Chaos

About the Book

More than half a century ago, trying to find his way out of the chaos of a dysfunctional family that suffers from a dark secret, eighteen-year-old Jimmy Whistler joins the Marines and is sent to Hawaii, not yet a state, where he meets a fifteen-year-old girl, Leilani Kona, who turns out to be the love of his life, his own “Sweet Leilani;” but, due to her age and his sense of honor, their love remains unconsummated. Later, shipped back to the mainland and discharged from the Marine Corps, Jimmy makes a false start in New York City as an actor, falling in with a show business crowd, and, still later, with a band of hippies, all the while trying to perfect his true calling as a writer who is attempting to discover order in a chaos that now appears to be not merely personal but public. How Jimmy and Leilani find each other again in the midst of this private and public chaos is a story both comic and tragic. A Portable Chaos is an historical novel that brings to life the transformation of the United States from the conforming Fifties to the volcanic social eruptions of the “swinging” Sixties—from the private chaos of Jimmy Whistler’s childhood to the public chaos of his youth, the former shaping himself, the latter shaping all Americans.

About the Author

As a student at New York University, E.M. Schorb published numerous poems in small journals. Later, he attended the prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre and for a time pursued a career as an actor, all the while accumulating publishing credits for his first collection of poetry, The Poor Boy and Other Poems, in the Living Poets Series of Dragon’s Teeth Press. Another collection followed and, in 1998, his third collection, Murderer’s Day, was awarded the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and published by Purdue University Press. Another collection, Time and Fevers, New and Selected Poems, published by Author House, won both the Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry and the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Award for Poetry. He has published three other novels, two from Denlinger’s Publishers, Ltd., Scenario for Scorsese and Paradise Square, which won the Grand Prize for Fiction at the first International eBook Award celebration at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and a third from Cherokee McGhee Publishers, Fortune Island. He is currently gathering his published stories for a collection, tentatively titled Stories, Etc. A former New Yorker, he now resides in North Carolina, where he lives with his wife, Patricia, continues to write, and spends his free time painting, for which he has also won several awards.