Anyone interested in the 1960s will be fascinated by the lives of Brud and Reggie Hicks, the brothers from Texas, their wives Gwendolyn Adams and Gwendolyn James, both members of historically prominent Boston area families, Sam Davis, the defrocked Methodist minister who joins them at Walden Brook, Leo Dennison, a local gun dealer and Keetsville native who is a former selectman, and Stacy Phelps, owner of the Keetsville general store. Brud, his wife, Gwennie, and Sam are hired to teach at Graham Community College, under the leadership of its president Colonel Walter Chapman Lewis, USMC, Ret., while Reggie pursues the outlaw ways that resulted in his being booted out of the Army after serving time in a military stockade in Germany. Leo rants against change, especially what he calls "that damned innersnake highway and them community colleges in Greenfield and Holyoke and Springfield, to say nothing of right here in Graham, and all them beatniks and Communists, and...all them other outsiders that will ride that damned road right into God's country here." All That Endures is a portrait of a world in transition, one that inevitably leads to today's troubled world. The novel will stir memories of those who lived through the times it recaptures. It recreates for those who came later an exciting, challenging, dangerous and often hilarious era in American life.
