Joan Brady
Description
One of seven siblings, Joan grew up on the New Jersey shore. While attending college for her degree in nursing (William Paterson University, Wayne, N.J.), she worked for two summers as one of the state's first female lifeguards. In 1994, at the age of forty-three, she left her career in nursing to pursue her life-long dream of becoming a writer. Bringing with her a six-year-old, oft-rejected manuscript and only what possessions would fit in the back of her eight-year-old Toyota, she then set out on a solo journey across the country, settling (only by chance) in the completely unfamiliar city of San Diego. Having never taken a writing class in her life, yet believing in the potential of her manuscript, she signed up for a one-night class at The Learning Annex on "How to Get Published." The rest, as they say, is history. Brady's best selling debut novel, "God on a Harley" (Pocket Books, 1995) was translated into seventeen languages around the world and was endorsed by well known self-help experts, Wayne Dyer ("Your Erroneous Zones," etc.) and John Gray ("Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus"). Film rights to this inspirational story were sold to Mimi Polk Gitlin, co-producer of the classic blockbuster, "THELMA AND LOUISE." Since the success of her first novel, Joan has developed an especially large and loyal following in the Latino community. She has since penned an additional six novels, most of which have become "best sellers" in Spain and Latin America. Today, she is an internationally recognized lecturer and author of seven successful books, she has also contributed numerous articles to professional journals and is frequently asked to speak to a wide variety of groups and organizations. She has been a guest on many television and radio programs here in the United States, as well as in Barcelona, Spain, and in Mexico City, Mexico.
Books
The imposter
A shady private investigator hires 14-year-old Ryan Waite to impersonate the long-lost son of a millionaire desperate to reconnect with his son before he dies. But Ryan finds himself performing a part beyond his depth, and must find a graceful and honorable way of making his exit when the moment of discovery arrives.
Bleedout
Helping young murder convict David Marion obtain his release from prison, blind lawyer Hugh Freyl, a member of an influential family, is subsequently killed, an incident for which David may have been set up as part of a financial scheme.
Theory of war
The narrator of this searing novel is the granddaughter of a slave. Her grandfather, Jonathan Carrick, was a white man. He was sold just after the Civil War to a struggling Kansas tobacco farmer - a common enough practice in those days when black slaves were no longer legal and the children of destitute soldiers were being marketed. You could pick up a white kid cheap, and Jonathan, only four years old, went for fifteen dollars.^ Woven together from his coded diaries and from memories of the embittered family, the harrowing story that emerges is that of a child denied his past, "bound out" to a brutish man (whose justification is "You get you an animal, you got to break him"), trussed and staked to the floor of the sod hut to keep him from running away, worked endlessly at planting, harvesting, picking off tobacco worms by hand, wrapping tobacco plugs (while the other children go to school), and - the ultimate humiliation - bullied by the soft, resentful son of the family, George Stoke. Through it all the anger burns, yet the fire forges an uncanny strength in the child. He bides his time. And then the railroad roars through the prairie, stopping at Sweetbrier, Kansas, and provides escape - freedom in the rough boomtown of Denver and a ferociously dangerous career as brakeman, astride the cars on the TransContinental Mogul heading into the Rockies.^ In the railroad yards, College, a gabby fellow runaway of sorts, befriends the helpless young man; in a bar in Cheyenne a fire-and-brimstone preacher fights for his soul; in a windswept farmhouse in Maine he finally gets the education that had been withheld. Jonathan survives - survives his "idyll with God," his education, his uneasy marriage. But the rage keeps breaking through, and always it is George Stoke, now a fat "cobra of a politician," known as the "fearless liberal" senator from Kansas, who is the target. The strategies of war - fueled by hatred - are what keep Jonathan Carrick in fighting trim. But as Joan Brady makes devastatingly clear in this brilliant and disturbing novel, the cost of slavery to flee human spirit is overwhelming, and her account of one man as victim leaves, in the mind of the reader, an enduring scar.