Mike-Randall-Writes.com
Michael McEwen Randall
Michael McEwen Randall is a veteran of the Marine Corps and a former city police officer, university instructor and founder/owner of a consulting company. He has written two books: the non-fiction, BECOMING HUMAN: A SERVANT OF THE MAP, and the novel, INTO THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY. He now lives on the northern Oregon coast where he writes a regular newspaper column, “Trying to See,” about politics, history, philosophy and faith.” His essays and profiles of people have appeared in a number of magazines and newspapers.
BECOMING HUMAN
Available for purchase either online or at your local bookstore.
Becoming a human being is the challenge for each of us, whether we recognize it or not. This book takes us on a journey through time and geography and many people’s struggles and pleasures, including the author’s journeys and those of the people about whom he writes. The book offers 56 previously published true stories about what it is to be or become a human being.
Join the author as he digs for the past at a 6,500 year old buffalo kill site in the empty mesa country of the Northern Plains. Take deck passage on a tramp steamer in southeast Asia, an adventure like no other. Meet a group of Dakota (Sioux) grandmothers bent on saving their young people from the snares of America’s dominant culture. Walk in the shoes of a big city police officer and experience the full gamut of human behavior from savagery to self-sacrifice and kindness. Join a young man for his first visit to his father, a “lifer” at a maximum security prison.
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INTO THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY
Available for purchase either online or at your local bookstore.
In late 1876, a preacher riding from Benson’s Landing, Montana Territory finds a badly wounded young man, near death, lying on the Bozeman Trail.
So begins the story of young Mac Durant, an orphaned survivor of the Minnesota Sioux War of 1862. At seventeen, he journeys west to Dakota Territory. But finally, out of money and near starvation, he reluctantly joins the U. S. Army of the West at Fort Abraham Lincoln. An experienced horseman, he is assigned to the Seventh Regiment of Cavalry, a unit commanded by George Custer. The regiment is about to depart on an expedition westward to find and confront a large gathering of Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples.
Assigned to C Company, Mac joins a set of four enlisted men among whom he has to confront himself for the first time, facing the hardships and uncertainties of common soldiers in the 19th Century west. Then, along a windswept dusty ridge above a meandering river in southeastern Montana Territory, they confront the face of battle and death.
Mac narrowly survives. He resumes his journey into the unknown country, but what he finds and who he becomes is an extraordinary human story.
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