Lloyd Bowers | Discover Thrilling Stories: Divide the Country, Freedom as Public Utility, The Results of Polar Bear Research & Keep These In the Family

About the Author

Lloyd Bowers was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1952, graduated from Furman University in 1976, and has lived in Charleston, South Carolina since 2002.

The Results of Polar Bear Research is Lloyd's first novel and was published in 2007. Lloyd's next book, Keep These in the Family, is a collection of twelve stories and was published in 2010.

"I grew up in the South," says Lloyd. "The Southern Appalachians is a sort of fixed foot in my life, and the summer-time is a great time to gravitate unpredictably in social settings."

"Freedom is a Public Utility, published 2014, developed from the discovery of a stash of old family letters, dated 1812 to 1857, mailed to my great-great-grandfather John Siegling, who emigrated from Erfurt, Germany, and settled in Charleston in 1820. That he was en route, or 'unterwegs,' for five years impressed me.

"Divide the Country! was published February, 2020. It reflects my concern about the disunity, and even partisan hatred, that plagues the U.S."

Latest Posts

16 Nov 2024

Saving Things

I admit I have a sort of love-hate relationship with Facebook, and I am a member. I look at pages of Facebook bloggers every day . . . a dozen times a day, in fact. In fact, I do not know what I would do without it: bits of trivia; geographical, oceanic, and celestial images accompanied by information on the various subjects; biographical information about all sorts of people; and a variety of musical subjects. Finally, Facebook does more than anything to keep us up to date with the evolution of the English language.

14 Nov 2024

Why the Democrats Lost, Part Two

An important question that Democrats should ask themselves—and that Republicans need to ask, too, for that matter—From what source do you derive your sense of Party priorities and intentions? Do you listen a lot of Democrat-orientated media, like CNN and MSNBC? Do you read Democrat-orientated newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post? And finally, do you check in a lot with Facebook bloggers.

12 Nov 2024

Why the Democrats Lost, Part One

Why the Democrats lost is a no-brainer: The rank-and-file cannot discern the Party's priorities and intentionality. The Party must have an agenda that its voters can rally behind, and it must show its members reference points that give the Party a place in the future of the country; but the Party can't do that. It can only show different entities within the Party pushing different agendae; so a lot of Democrats did not vote.

06 Nov 2024

A Room With a View Part 2

I went with a group of people to see the movie A Room With a View when it came out in 1985, and we were nearly the only ones in the theatre. We went during the afternoon, which is typically a slow time, but I doubt a British movie set in 1905 would draw much of an audience at any showing, even with discounted prices. The movie-title and story-plot come from a novel by the British writer E. M. Forster.

04 Nov 2024

A Room With a View Part 1

I went with several family members to see the movie A Room With a View when it came out in 1985, and we were nearly the only ones in the theatre. We went during a week-day afternoon, which is typically a slow time, but I doubt a British movie set in 1905, with hoity-toity characers, would draw much of an audience at any showing, even with discounted prices. The movie-title, script, and story-plot are derived from a novel by the British writer E. M. Forster.

30 Oct 2024

A Passage to India: Prelude to Civil War and Division

In 1984, I went with a group to see Passage to India, starring Alec Guinness, James Fox, and Peggy Ashcroft—based on the novel by the British novelist E. M. Forster, who published it in 1924. Guinness and Ashcroft were already long past their prime when they did Passage to India. Guinness first appeared in the 1946 movie, Great Expectations, based on the novel by Charles Dickens. Ashcroft had starred in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps from 1935. Even James Fox appears too old to play Cyril Fielding. What they lack in youth, at any rate, they more than make up for it, with a relaxed professionalism.

28 Oct 2024

Friedrich Schiller

My old German teacher Hermine Kahl suggested that I listen to a recording of German poems, as the means to adopt a spirited intonation of German words. She played the recording for me in her home. When a poem particularly touched her, I could hear her chortle with a grimacing smile, that signalled a personal connection to it, as if savoring it.

23 Oct 2024

When Will History Begin?

I first tackled the novels of Bernard Malamud back in prep school. They include some sex scenes; so the public school system could not put them in a library, or recommend them, even if Malamud was one of the greatest writers in American literature. Barry Levinson directed a bowdlerized film version of Malamud's The Natural in 1984, starring Robert Redford. John Frankenheimer directed Malamud's The Fixer in 1968, starring Dirk Bogarde and Alan Bates. My literature professors told me, "Don't bother with a movie." I'd say that's true for Malamud. Read the book!

17 Oct 2024

An Echo of Theresa

After I finished college in 1975, I returned to my home in Columbus, Georgia, and started working for my father at his livestock feedmill. The first six months or so was pure hell for a guy who had studied literature in college, knew next to nothing about running a business, and I was spindly and out of shape from doing schoolwork continuously for four years. I walked a fairly steep learning curve for so long, I really don't remember when I finally settled into a routine.

16 Oct 2024

The End of the World

I saw this article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper back in March of this year. The title of it reads "Rejoicing Over the End of the World". The article begins "We live in an apocalyptic age". Many people consider themselves the "Last Generation". Humanity once had a vision of itself as "sapiens"—the best of the Homo genus. Now, we might consider changing it to "Homo destruens", in view of our appetite for destruction through global-warming and nuclear weapons,

14 Oct 2024

Little-Girl Games

The murder of actress Sharon Tate and four other people took place over the night of August 8-9th, 1969. Witnesses in the same neighborhood said they heard gunshots and screams through the night. I was seventeen at the time, concerned with meeting girls and going off to college, so that the deaths hardly registered with me. My World remained pretty small until I went off to college. I just didn't pay much attention to current events at that time.

11 Oct 2024

There's a Sucker Born Every Minute

According to the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia, no one knows for certain who first uttered this truism. The circus-owner P. T. Barnum may have originated it, since he exhibited fraudulent freaks as part of his circus acts. Besides him, Wikipedia names Michael Cassius McDonald, the nineteenth-century gambling-parlor-boss of Chicago, as the first person to actually say it—or just any swindler looking to get rich quick by bilking poor fools out of their money.

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