Blowing in the Wind

by John Murnane

Three boys head out into the desert in search of scorpions in the summer of 1968. They become lost, and on their journey encounter desert denizens, both animal and human. In the process, they learn about survival, war, racial prejudice, courage and friendship, and end up rescuing an injured test pilot and discovering clues to a lost gold mine.

273 pages, Paperback

Published November 24, 2019

About the author

John Murnane is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, where he spent forty years running a cancer research laboratory and teaching cancer and cell biology to medical residents and graduate students. He received his PhD from UCLA in 1980.
After a career that exceeded his wildest expectations, retirement finally gave him the chance to do something he had always wanted: write novels.
His first novel, Blowing in the Wind, draws from his childhood growing up in the desert and the stories passed down by his father, a small-town newspaper editor. His second novel, The Rose and the Thistle, tells the fascinating true story of how vaccinations were created in the laboratory born from his lifelong belief that science becomes most powerful when it is made accessible and human.
His third novel, Irreproducible Results, is a murder mystery set inside a medical research laboratory. It is drawn directly from his own research experiences and rooted in his area of expertise, the molecular biology of cancer and chromosome instability. It is the kind of book only someone who actually lived in that world could write.
John believes that storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to help people understand and care about science. That belief runs through everything he writes.

Reviews

[Andrew Maxwell]

The author leveraged his own experiences growing up in small desert towns with a father who was a small town newspaper journalist in Southern California to bring the reader to understand such life in the late 60s when boys becoming men were faced with past and ongoing racial strife and how to view patriotism as it relates to the war their fathers fought versus the Vietnam War they were facing to enlist, to be drafted into, or to seek to defer though college. All of these issues, which were foremost in the conscience of the nation, are in the context of the strong influences of their own fathers.

The story itself becomes riveting when set in the desert where there are the dangers of both nature and man. Surviving nature in a desert is challenging enough but it’s made all the more challenging by dangerous remnants of the past with abandoned mines those still seeking their fortune. Coupled with the tales of lost gold mines, these are the ingredients irresistible to boys seeking adventure. The desert also attracts those seeking solitude and refuge from society and the law. The characters they encounter are a mix of those more dangerous than anything they encountered in nature and those who would become heroes, mentors and lifelong friends.

Although enjoyable to any reader, its audience is likely best the school-age reader. It would do well on a list for high school American literature, English and history classes along with Steinbeck’s novels and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s “Farewell to Manzanar”.

[Jeffrey L. Schwartz]

Exciting Story that is hard to put down

This is a page-turner about 3 boys facing and overcoming numerous physical and psychological obstacles. The plot twists and turns as much as the paths of the boys through mines and canyons in the Southern California desert. The story also takes on the family and national debates over the challenges of the late sixties.