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About Featured Book: Zoratama The Muisca Princess by Jaime Bedoya Martinez

The history of pre-Hispanic South America is prolific in narratives of violence perpetuated, in battle and commerce, to an indigenous population. Mostly for the sake of feeding a perverse avarice and yearning for indulgence that was the fashion for Old World society at the time, this conquering force overcame great odds and difficulties to satisfy their greed for material treasure. They consequently took out their frustration and discomfort on these communities. Their occupation exhibited the brutality of a society desperate to pay their debts and build their riches with whatever could be extracted from other people, foreign lands.

Disregarded by history are the stories of the daily life of these indigenous people as they built true humane societies and developed myths to satisfy their curiosities of the workings of their natural world.

What has been lost to history is the spark of wonder when the European encountered the native for the first time, in submission rather than domination. Zoratama is that glimpse, told in the passion of a conquistador for a native beauty. The story is a tragedy of the forbidden, unprecedented and one that passion, eroticism, could not resolve. Love defeated by one of the many sins which motivated Europe to its genocidal tendencies. Ultimately it is not devotion to another being which drove the history, but rather devotion to the unknown.

Jaime Bedoya Martinez’s Zoratama constructs the structure for modern Hispanic society through the unrealistic passion of consorts of divergent worlds. His belief that the legacy of the Muisca has been abandoned is true, for beyond anthropological and archeological studies explaining in detail the life, religion, society of these people, little credit is given to their contributions to current culture.

And the assimilation, whether military or societal, of these cultures is anything but polite; the Spaniards greedy and brutal, the Muisca resolute and tribal.

Mr. Bedoya beautifully builds an alternate storyline which ultimately argues that commitment to passion and transcendence has no boundaries. Zoratama, the Muisca princess, and Lázaro Fonte, the Spanish conquistador, construct a love story for the ages, replete with spiritual integration and an offspring of a new race.

Ultimately, the writer in his true fashion destroys this love, immersed in the tragic myths of both races, in an absurd annihilation of people, family, emotion and sentiment because the ironic metaphor that evolves is the incarnation of a new race, culture and historical footprint.

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About Featured Book: Beyond the Song by Carol Selick

Beyond the Song is an autobiographical novel based on the author’s coming of age in the ‘sixties and early ‘seventies. A singer-songwriter like her alter-ego Carol Marks, Carol Selick begins each chapter with lyrics she wrote and still performs today. Taken together, the songs introduce the themes of her story and trace the development of her character as she rebels against her strict suburban upbringing to join the counter-culture in hopes of fulfilling her dream of making it in the music business.

The narrator relates her tale in a warm, vulnerable, and irrepressibly zany voice as Carol goes to school in Washington DC, drops out to take a pilgrimage to Berkeley, and eventually winds up living in New York in pursuit of making it in the music business. Torn between romance and career, she continually wavers.

Her quest for freedom lands her in a series of dangerous situations and narrow escapes: she hitchhikes in California at the time of the Manson murders, attends anti-war demonstrations that turn violent, and is nearly arrested when her boyfriend is nabbed in a drug raid.

Along the way, the narrator also meets two important guides who help her sort her priorities, take herself seriously, and develop her considerable talents: Rose, a pioneering black woman songwriter based on hall-of-famer Rose Marie McCoy, Carol’s real-life mentor; and Bruce Pasternak, a fictionalized psychoanalyst who helps her establish the self-assurance to stand on her own two feet at a time when female singer-songwriters had few role models. All inform the heroine’s lyrics and narrative voice as she gradually learns to believe in herself, discipline her talent, and turn her heartbreak into song.

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This Fiction book is available in these Formats: eBook, Print, Audiobook

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