Final Judgment

Famous author, Kenneth Flear, becomes a creative writing professor at an eminent university. A brilliant college senior invites the professor to support her protest to prevent President George W. Bush from delivering the keynote at her commencement. After her self-sacrifice stops the president, Flear is commissioned to write a drop-in bestseller about the incident that ultimately asserts the insanity of the student. Attending Book Expo America in Washington D.C. in May 2006, the professor is featured at an author breakfast and panel discussion. With booksellers everywhere in foment over the books conclusions, readers must make a final judgment for themselves.

Publishers Weekly

In this posthumous novel, Asinof (who died in June and is best known for Eight Men Out) presents a cartoonish indictment of Bush-era morals with a story narrated by Kenneth Flear, a novelist-turned-English professor at a northeastern university. Flear meets an impassioned student, Anne Miner, who wants to block the commencement speech of George W. Bush at the university. Flear, a "middle-aged radical who had been mugged by time" is now reluctant to jeopardize his chances for tenure and opts not to participate in Anne's protest. In the meantime, he is wined and dined by publishing bigwig Jonathan Purcell and finds himself attracted to Purcell's slick moneyed world. Flear's sense of who he wants to be is challenged when Anne interrupts commencement with an act that shocks the nation, and Purcell soon has Flear writing a smear book about Anne. What starts decently enough quickly devolves, and the narrative grows more absurd as it goes on; by the climax-at a taping of Good Morning America at Book Expo America featuring Barack Obama, Charlie Gibson, Bill O'Reilly, Bob Woodward and, of course, Flear-well, it's nearly impossible to suspend that much disbelief.(Oct.)

Eliot Asinof is renowned for one of the top sports books of all time, Eight Men Out, his brilliant reconstruction of the infamous Chicago Black Sox scandal in the 1919 World Series, as well as Man on Spikes, considered perhaps of the greatest baseball novel ever. Asinof attended Williams College and graduated from Swarthmore, after which he played minor league baseball for the Philadelphia Phillies organization. He is the author of five novels and eight works of nonfiction. He has written numerous screenplays for television and motion pictures and has appeared in two John Sayles films, Eight Men Out and Sunshine State. He lives in Ancramdale, New York.