The Sum of My Works

"Things roll downhill, energy dissipates, disorder increases. Things wear out, break, fall apart." Jimmy Doyle describes his life as a mechanic in these terms, but these hard truths better describe the thirty–year story of the Doyle brothers as told in The Sum of My Works. On the eve of the Cuban Missile crisis, the lives of Jimmy and Patrick Doyle are shattered as surely as if the button had been pushed. Together and apart, the brothers experience the fear and uncertainty of intergenerational trauma, the justice system, incarceration, and the Vietnam War as well as the heady 1960s counterculture, the anti–war movement, exile, wilderness, and survival against overwhelming odds. Through it all, the brothers search for the human connections they've lost, as they struggle against the inexorable forces arrayed against them until they must face yet another personal apocalypse––and betrayal of their brotherhood.

-- John Keck