The Insider

This compelling and sometimes edgy depiction of life events reveals a coming-of-age theme, as our young protagonist Lefty becomes engaged inside the creation and maturation of the first personal computer, and the evolution of the ARPANET into the Internet. The story follows him through a personal and professional maturation, while he lives out planned and unplanned life adventures.

The story holds riveting and humorous flashback adventures from our hero’s youth through adulthood. The story line weaves through his involuntary military experiences, his family, his continuing education, and love of cars, baseball, and computers, and the formation of his idealism.

He creates positive impacts as an older and wiser adult, while holding elected and appointed public offices. He works through his disillusionment with corporate employment, escaping the golden handcuffs to create and operate his own computer businesses, while testing the latest computer operating systems. An unexpected joyous epiphany awakens him to previously unknown personal and professional possibilities. This metamorphosis changes his life, helps him find love, and allows him to recapture his youthful idealism, which included inventing and guiding a nonprofit agency, where he could put his passions to work for the under-served.

Written as a highly illustrated fictional third person narrative historical autobiography, the author uses first person short stories as a literary vehicle to back-fill the stories of his main characters early life. He speaks of his children, girlfriends and wives, which include several adult situations. He speaks of an intellectual curiosity for technology, a passion for baseball, a love for cars, music, and a thirst for education, as he progressively reveals more of his life story, using a heavily footnoted and technically approachable vocabulary and style.

These stories form an unpredictable epic mosaic, which take the reader through a continuous roller-coaster of emotions of joyous to sad, curious to disgusted, from laughing aloud, to tears, to anger, and back and forth repeatedly.

 Our main character refuses to be stymied, always pressing on to the next big thing, the next level. Not content with awards or accomplishments, he seeks not the comfort of repetition, but the creation and fulfillment of the next achievement.

The story evolves to reveal an extraordinarily compelling life profoundly influenced by idealism, his passions, and of his immersion in musical melody, harmony, and lyrics that tell stories. This coming of age story can be seen as a modern day Bildungsroman.