American Robot: A CULTURAL CHAMELEON RISES ABOVE RACE and RELIGIOUS TRAUMAS (PB) (2021)

Caught between family demands, social groups, and ostracized as a member of the religious "Holy Rollers," the author of AMERICAN ROBOT: A Cultural Chameleon Rising Above Race & Religious Traumas balances on precarious razor edges of sacred edicts, genetic mental illnesses, and toxic social stress. Parental physical abuse and rigid mental programming add to repeated cult behavior-modification strategies. Author Aaron Anthony Vessup boldly confronts opposing social and spiritual quandaries. The writer narrowly escapes police bullets, suicide, and institutionalization. Interracial fraternizing has proven dangerous. This extraordinary memoir highlights a boy clinging to a dream of promoting United Nation idealism, while on the fringes of seething social protests and violence. Moving from South Central Los Angeles to Nebraska, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, his mounting rage morphs into decisions threatening to erase hard-earned achievements. With unabashed frankness, the author takes readers on a transforming journey beyond America, between social class intersections, cultures, and lifestyles. Torn between guilt of social inactivity and passions for justice, doing the right thing becomes increasingly problematical as mental haunts seem to prevail. AMERICAN ROBOT: A Cultural Chameleon Rising Above Race & Religious Traumas traces nontraditional paths taken to shake free from psychological controls that are used to shackle fierce desires for independence. Memoir word count approximates sixty-nine thousand, dissecting conditioning processes affecting various levels of social and mental instability.