Jonathan Robertson lives in Northern California with his wife Alicia. He has owned and operated a number of small companies, worked with NASA, Netflix, and the ACLU over the years. He produced Ellipsis, a literary magazine released as a series of books. He writes, paints in oil from time to time, and drives his three-wheeled Trihawk when the weather is nice.

Part II of Rebel Without a Clue is called The Great American Dream Machine, available at rebelclue.blogspot.com

Review:

Rebel Without a Clue ~ a stained-glass life, cast in amber

This memoir by Jonathan Robertson, encapsulates that moment of awakening in American history-the 1970s-and brings it forward to meet the present conflict in American values. A young man's stand against a war, a motorcycle journey, and a friendship. Just a couple of guys riding the blue-gray ribbons of America's existence, culminating in a few home truths.

The motorcycle journal itself-The Wet Shoe Journals-is charmingly simple. It chronicles the day-to-days between boyhood and a fate sealed in either federal prison or taking over the family business-some mundane, a few rather funny, and some thoughtful. The story is a series of interludes dealing with new places and unfamiliar faces, plus all the cold, wet, sunshiny moments of life on the road with not much more than a toothbrush, a fresh pair of socks, and a nervous grin.

Beyond the journals there are chapters of fierce introspection and defiance, ruminating and wrestling with existentialism and actualization as the first rumbles of American dystopia curdled the dream. At root cause, racism and magical thinking. Triggering everything was the immense lottery of Vietnam and what Robertson refers to as "The Great Teenage Diaspora" from the hinterland. Innocence lost.

Robertson recounts his early life, with early indications of an innate otherwiseness. As a kid, he was fed up with testing and rote memorization, so he artfully dodged pre-programmed fare and read his way through three years of high school at local parks before jumping into college. Philosophy, archeology, poetry, and prose; high adventure, quantum mechanics, cosmology, and classical literature. Plus a hefty dose of theology (taken twice, with attendant maps of the Holy Land), and PB&J sandwiches for sustenance.

An endeavor born from a desire to escape, this develops into a carefully curated education in intellectual rebellion. It is in the aptly named Music & Lyrics chapter that Robertson's glittering prose and literary perception peaks. It is a lifetime's culmination of learning how to think, rather than what to think. And it unfolds in an exquisite, pragmatic ode to those great voices of an era where art, the great thinkers, and those who read and listened to them swirl on a knife's edge of ecstatic epiphany.

His own writing unfurls a fascinating notion-learning Shakespeare to understand Bob Dylan: "His songs were like stained glass windows shattered in a church of our own devising, and in their ruin became a more accurate reflection of a world we hadn't understood before. He knew how to break and rebuild language such that we could see our own truth-like Plato's Forms-clearly, and for the first time." Simply brilliant.

Using this same technique, Robertson overlays the human social evolution from the Middle Ages onto the present and compares Dr. King's arc of justice to where we are today. And that's what makes this book so important. It is not just a voice from the generation that stopped a war, but a thesis born of self-awareness and an understanding of history and our present unsustainable predicament.

This is the voice of the silent majority who refuse to go quietly into that good night.

~ Nicolette Lategan