For Immediate Release
Contact: Barbara J. Olexer: 503.914.6094; joyouspub@comcast.net
As the Twig is Bent So Grows the Tree Joyous Publishing announces the publication of Father to the Man, a large print novel by Just before the twins graduate, Kurt’s girlfriend, Merrilee Corbin, tells him she is pregnant. They decide to elope to His first marriage ends in divorce and Keith marries a second time after he has graduated from college and begun his career as an architect. He is successful and very happy. He and his wife, Phyllis, have a daughter they name Lindsay. She is three when Phyllis leaves Keith for another man, abandoning Lindsay as well. Keith hires a housekeeper and lives happily enough, then the pregnancy of one of his girlfriends brings him full circle to deal with the same problems that he dealt with vicariously for Kurt twenty-odd years earlier. “I set this story in Barbara J. Olexer was born in Official publication date is October 22, 2009. Available now from Amazon.com, Scribd.com, Blackwell’s Book Services, YBP Library Services, Coutts Library Services, Emery-Pratt Company, and Joyous Publishing. $17.95. The cover photo is by Fred Stockwell, www.stockwellphotos.com, who specializes in photos of -30- Is It Criminal or Justice?
Joyous Publishing announces publication of Criminal Justice, a novel by Barbara J. Olexer. A careless bureaucrat, with the best intentions, unjustly removes Virgil and Rhonda Thwait’s two small children from their custody. Their lawyer is no help and they despairingly find they have no means of fighting the bureaucratic decision. A concatenation of errors makes the tragic mistake final and the children are given up to adoptive parents. The stress drives the Thwaits apart and costs them their marriage, home, and business. Having lost everything and realizing that she will never see her babies again, Rhonda devises her own retribution.
“I wrote this book to protest the vast power the government is allowed to wield over American families,” Olexer says. “Parents may be harassed and even have their children removed from their custody permanently with nothing more than a bureaucratic hearing. Due process and evidence of wrong-doing or law-breaking are often ignored as two or three social workers decide what is best for the children. There is not even any assurance that they won’t be abused by their new custodians, making them worse off than they were before. We need safeguards for our children but we also need due process in implementing the laws. Good intentions on the part of lawmakers and social workers are simply not enough. If you think I’m exaggerating, look on the Internet. There are 82.9 million sites that deal with child abuse or accusation of child abuse.”
The Internet plays a large part in Rhonda Thwait’s campaign of vengeance. Through various social networking sites and Social Services sites, she is able to obtain the information she needs to implement her plan. Working the system from the outside, she finally achieves Criminal Justice.
“Most of my books are set in
Barbara J. Olexer was born in
Official publication date is November 10, 2009. Available now from Amazon.com, Scribd.com, Blackwell’s Book Services, YBP Library Services, Coutts Library Services, Emery-Pratt Company, and Joyous Publishing. $17.95
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Not an Accidental Murder but a Murderous Accident
Joyous Publishing announces the release of the second in the series of Marge O’Connor mysteries, Murder by Accident, by Barbara J. Olexer. It’s 1950 and Marge is in her first year of teaching. She has the upper four grades in the two-room school at Camp Five, a logging camp attached to the mill town of
“Camp 5 has a special place in my heart,” Olexer says, “and I’m always happy to return, even if it has to be in fiction. Many other former residents feel the same, judging by the letters and email messages I received regarding Death Takes a Flyer, the first book of the series.”
The second printing of Death Takes a Flyer is also being released at this time. It is also a mystery set in 1950 in Camp Five and features Marge O’Connor. When a young wife and mother goes missing, then her mother-in-law is found dead on a Flexible Flyer sled, Marge finds herself in the maelstrom of murderous events. A snowstorm cuts the little community off from the outside world, narrowing the possible suspects to Marge’s friends and neighbors. The murderer knows her every move, putting her in grave danger.
“Many people are nostalgic for the fifties and a way of life that included rugged individualism and didn’t include technology relentlessly hammering at us 24/7. We had electricity and piped-in water but no telephones until around 1955. We got TV about 1954 but only one channel; radio reception was poor. Life was easier in many ways because we didn’t have so many distractions. We had time to think and reflect.”
Barbara J. Olexer was born in
Official publication date of Murder by Accident is November 12, 2009. Both books are available now from Amazon.com, Scribd.com, Blackwell’s Book Services, YBP Library Services, Coutts Library Services, Emery-Pratt Company, and Joyous Publishing. $17.95 each
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Forty-two Fascinating Guys – the U.S. Presidents
Interest in the presidents is always high, especially in this election year, and many people wonder how they were brought up and how were they educated. There are hundreds of books available but who has time to read them all? Or even one book about each president?
Now there is one book that responds to these interests. Presidential Education: Prelude to Power by Barbara J. Olexer tells how each president was educated, beginning with George Washington and ending with George W. Bush. Each chapter includes such educational experiences as parental guidance, travel, and military service, as well as formal schooling to age twenty-five or until attainment of his highest college degree. Some presidents spent little or no time in school – Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Jackson, for instance. Some had considerable military experience by the time they were twenty-five – Washington in the French and Indian War, Monroe and Jackson in the Revolutionary War, Hayes and Garfield in the Civil War, Kennedy and George H.W. Bush in World War II. A few had traveled widely – John Quincy Adams, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, Hoover, and JFK.
“I wrote this book because it occurred to me one day that a number of our presidents would not meet minimum requirements to seek a job as a receptionist in these days when many firms require a college degree,” Olexer says, “and I became interested in exactly how these men had been educated. The Founding Fathers did not lay down any educational requirements for the president, nor did they describe the ideal candidate. There is no qualifying exam.” The book is packed with fascinating facts about our presidents as young men: George Washington was once an officer in the British Army; John Adams and James Monroe each carried a gun to school; John Quincy Adams failed his first Harvard entrance exam; Franklin Pierce was constantly in trouble at college for ingesting illicit substances – root beer and gingerbread; Abraham Lincoln's father objected to his reading and studying, considering it lazy and a waste of time; Teddy Roosevelt was afraid of his laundress when he attended Harvard; Woodrow Wilson, the only president with a Ph.D., dropped out of three colleges; Franklin D. Roosevelt was fourteen when he was arrested in Germany four times in one day; Ronald Reagan saved seventy-seven lives working summers as a life guard. Barbara J. Olexer is a fourth-generation Oregonian. She is the author of more than twenty books and screenplays, including the nonfiction book, The Enslavement of the American Indian in Colonial Times. Her formative years were spent in small farming towns and a logging camp. After fourteen years working at the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education(NCATE) in Washington, D.C., she has returned to Oregon, where her children and grandchildren live.
Official publication date is Presidents Day, February 16, 2009. $24.95. Available now from Amazon.com and Joyous Publishing. -30-
