Hide and Play Dead

This is a book to be experienced.

This book is an unfolding adventure story that you will not want to put down for a minute. You will enter the writer's intimate life history starting nine generations before his birth and up through his current real-time adventure of self-healing while writing.     

This book will engage you.

Whoever you are–– whatever your age, gender, personal background, racial identity, sexual orientation, vocation or social class–– you will strongly relate to some parts of this book.

This book will begin to heal you.

The book is structured to evoke the emotional states necessary to recover from oppression and teach by example the survival skills needed to stay safe from social predators.

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This autobiographical novel is interwoven with the real-time adventure story of my liberation from ancestral patterns based on slavery. The flow, from the beginning and up to the joyous conclusion of the book, appears as a seamless cinematographic stream with an unforgettable true storyline.

It is a riveting exposé and psychological thriller filled with international intrigue and startling revelations uncovering inside secrets of the black aristocracy and Intelligentsia, renowned educational institutions, and the field of medicine.  

Moving anecdotes, irony and sardonic humor, innuendoes and mysterious dangling phrases, metaphor and symbolism, poetic prose, mythological references, allegorical and mystical depictions, auditory, visual and onomatopoetic leitmotifs, and a stark self-revealing stance produce a level of excitement that is necessary to break traumatic patterns in the reader, as well as to create a literary masterpiece.

“Hide and Play Dead” is also a bold critique that challenges systems of social oppression, including racism, dysfunctional parenting, predatory relationships, educational elitism, homophobia, and physician corruption under the tyranny of “the business model”.

It highlights the ultimate threat to democracy: global neo-slavery under the rule of a corporate elite, and galvanizes the populist resistance to this crisis that emerged in the past two presidential elections.

OVERVIEW OF THE PLOT

This is my story of being a mixed-race African-American growing up as the solo child desegregationist in a conservative mid-North Western city in the 1960’s, whose dysfunctional family represents the pinnacle of the black aristocracy.

I escape the racial violence and domestic turmoil by going to the nation’s most elite private schools, where I excel academically but fail to fit in socially—replicating my parent’s own histories of child prodigy and abandoned half-Jewish orphan.

I come out of the closet as an openly gay man while attending Harvard Medical School and become an iconoclastic alternative healer.

I narrate my series of ten toxic “marriages” to narcissists and other social predators, and my “work” as I witness the corruption and collapse of the field of medicine. I reach a crisis point and realize that I must write a truthful account of my history to fully recover from a lifetime of trauma.

Dramatic real-time events occur as I write the book, highlighted by the rediscovery of my ancestral roots and the after-effects of slavery upon my life’s course and identity.