C.T. Fitzgerald
Emerald Books
‎978-1954779709                    
$4.99 e-book , 11.99 paperback plus freight
 
Double Vision: Stories From Home, embraces the childhood and life of author C.T. Fitzgerald, providing prose and poetry that capture his world through a series of candid truths about what he saw, experienced, and heard.
 
The stories unfold an origami of life impressions that some readers may find gritty in their language, and perhaps even politically or racially biased or derogatory. These images of yesteryear are replete with such representations because Fitzgerald maintains that “…exposing the realities of that world is an important learning tool because, in my opinion, much of what I have presented along objectionable lines still exists throughout our society in this world.”
 
From the five-word opening flash fiction piece ‘For Sale: American Dreams’ to the more detailed ‘Bodies,’ which explores an unnamed northern city on the eastern shore of Lake Erie which explodes with racial tension in the 1960s, the backdrop serves as an unusual adjunct to a story about first responders whose actions lead to surprising revelations and end results that depart from normal life progressions: “No mention was made in the paper of the “fucking idiot” Firefighter who almost wasted Officer Mike Conner.”
 
“Locked and Loaded” assumes an entirely different prospect as the responder muses, “Would he have to face a whole family of these sneaky cocksuckers?”
 
Readers might not expect humor to intersect with social and political observation, but Fitzgerald’s candid vignettes open both cans of worms and hilarity as events unfold with the precise observations of a world replete with police, shotguns, working-class men, the mysteries of women, and jobs on the line.
 
More so than most memoirs or collections about community and coming of age, Fitzgerald’s stories in Double Vision reinforce a sense of time and place that will seem both alien and oddly familiar to his readers. 
 
His attention to building the dialogues and interpersonal interactions that come from assumptions about the world and minorities as well as white privilege makes for a collection that is as constantly hard-hitting as trench warfare, and as socially thought-provoking as any history of the times.
 
Double Vision: Stories From Home would do especially well as a book club selection, powering its insights with controversial subjects that will lend to debate and social inspection among a wide circle of readers.
 
Libraries that choose Double Vision: Stories From Home for their literary collections will find it will appeal to readers of memoirs as well as literature students interested in vignettes that circle around what can and cannot be changed in the community, world, and self.