Gerald Clerie

Life for Booty Gerald Clerie

Imagine... Eleven generations of a family bearing a surname whose significance and meaning no one ever bothered to question in earnest. Imagine a tribe thirty-two thousand strong, claiming a whole gamut of last names while all hailing from a single glorious ancestor. Imagine adhering to a creed and living by standards handed down from fathers to sons from the days when first names were all that was needed for identification, and not perceiving how they came about and why they matter so much. Imagine living in a land of recent adoption, vaguely remembering storylines from ancient ancestors who claimed to belong to another continent, another era, and were stripped from there by the force of circumstances to an enchanted island, only to become part of its gestation as a novel national entity struggling over two hundred years to find its place in the concert of nations. Imagine . . . Life for Booty is the amazing saga of a peculiar family that received the impetus of a pere-grination back in the sixteenth century from its original Ireland to southeastern France, on to north-western France, on to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola for a four-decade sojourn, only to land on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the Windy City for twenty years of an impossible adaptation. This tantalizing story will inspire, illuminate, and prod to positive action the honest reader who approaches this book with an open mind and a tender heart to the plight of the oppressed peo-ples of an aging and tired planet-yet still groping for hope.