Summer of '68

Franklin Roosevelt Cribbs’ summer job, at an art and music camp in the Wisconsin woods, spiraled into the wildest journey of his life. But this was true for almost anyone in that summer of 1968. Camp Nantoka was a piece of Chicago ripped from its roots and dropped into the woods. While campers came for art and music, their city simmered with racial tension and political turmoil. Thrust into the maelstrom, Cribbsy feels his way, learning fast, arguing, fighting, blundering, falling in love, coming of age.

David Benjamin is a lifelong storyteller. His fiction includes The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked and seven books under his new imprint, Last Kid Books: Three’s a Crowd, A Sunday Kind of Love, Almost Killed by a Train of Thought: Collected Essays, Summer of ’68, Skulduggery in the Latin Quarter, Black Dragon and Jailbait.  As a journalist, Benjamin has edited newspapers, published and edited several magazines, and authored SUMO: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Japan’s National Sport. In its first year, Benjamin’s imprint, Last Kid Books, won six independent press awards. His essays have appeared in publications that include the Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Examiner, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, EE Times and Common Dreams. Benjamin and his wife Junko Yoshida have been married for ages. They live sometimes in Madison, Wisconsin and sometimes in Paris.