Finding Billy Battles: An Account of Peril, Transgression, and Redemption - Paperback

by Ronald E. Yates (Author)

When a great-grandson inherits two aging trunks and a stack of meticulously detailed journals penned by his great-grandfather, he sets out to fulfill his great-grandfather's last request: to tell the story of an incredible life replete with adventure, violence, and tragedy. The great-grandfather's name is Billy Battles--a man often trapped and overwhelmed by circumstances beyond his control. For much of his 100-year-long life Billy is a man missing and largely unknown to his descendants. His great-grandson is about to change that. As he works his way through the aging journals and the other possessions he finds in the battered trunks he uncovers the truth about his mysterious great-grandfather--a man whose deeds and misdeeds propelled him on an extraordinary and perilous journey from the untamed American West to the inscrutable Far East, Latin America and Europe. As he flips through the pages of the handwritten journals he learns of Billy's surprising connections to the Spanish-American War, French Indochina, and revolutions in Mexico and other Latin American countries. But most of all he learns that in finding Billy Battles he has also found a long lost and astonishing link to the past.

Author Biography

Ronald E. Yates is a former award-winning foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and Dean Emeritus of the College of Media at the University of Illinois where he was also a Professor of Journalism. He is the author of Finding Billy Battles, the first in a trilogy of novels published Nov. 2013. The Kikkoman Chronicles: A Global Company with A Japanese Soul, published by McGraw-Hill. His books also include Aboard The Tokyo Express: A Foreign Correspondent's Journey Through Japan, a collection of columns translated into Japanese, as well as three journalism textbooks: The Journalist's Handbook, International Reporting and Foreign Correspondents, and Business and Financial Reporting in a Global Economy. Yates lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in Japan, Southeast Asia and Latin America where he covered several major stories including the fall of South Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975, the 1989 Tiananmen Square tragedy in Beijing, and revolutions in Nicaragua, El Salvador an Guatemala. He is a graduate of the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas. Author's Note: Finding Billy Battles is a work of "faction." That is, the story it tells is based partly on fact, but it has been augmented with narrative fiction. Many of the protagonists in the story were actual persons, and some of the incidents actually happened. However, other characters and events in the book are fictional. In telling the saga of Billy Battles, I have mined my family's history and the stories I heard various family members tell while I was growing up in my native state of Kansas, a place rife with a rich Native American and immigrant history. It is, and was, a place filled with fascinating characters-especially those men and women of the past who worked so hard to transform what people once called the Great American Desert into one of the most productive regions on the planet. I have also attempted to stay true to the vernacular of the time and place, especially late nineteenth-century Kansas. The reader will notice, therefore, a difference in the tone, mood, and colloquial language that Billy Battles uses to tell his story from the way a contemporary individual might speak. Fortunately, I can recall with reasonable accuracy the way relatives, most now deceased, spoke and behaved as I was reaching adulthood in Kansas.