Welcome to Between the Covers summer series where we put the spotlight on our South Florida authors.

Hi, I'm Ann Bocock and joining me is Sam Bierstock, author of Full Circle.

On its surface, it's the story of a Vietnam veteran facing his past and rekindling his passion for music.

But it's much more of a story.

Welcome.

Hi.

Thank you for having me.

I can't get into this book until we understand you a little bit more.

Your life, your journey.

To say that you are multiaceted, I think, is an understatement.

Let me give the the Cliff's note version.

Your career has spanned from engineering to medicine to music and writing.

And all of this really is connected in your novel Full Circle.

So, why did you want to write that book?

Possibly the world's longest identity crisis.

Um, I've had a very eclectic career and all of the things you've mentioned.

And at the age of 50, after leaving medicine, I had been semi-professional harmonica player and um, I got what I thought was a crazy idea to start a band uh, and have it a parody band dealing with managed care.

got a great band together and the whole thing caught on and we got national attention and toured the country.

What was the name of the band?

The band was called Dr. Sam and the managed care blues band.

Of course it was.

Of course.

And we had titles like you picked a fine time to leave me Blue Shield or your one hit mama cuz they won't pay for two.

So all of that kind of thing and it caught on and I had a marvelous 10 to 15 year career touring the country with a band.

So having come from a career in medicine to having a band um it was a pretty wild transition and now you have the book full circle.

Give us the bird's eyee view a couple of sentences of the plot without giving too much away.

Well I tried to combine things from my various careers to tell this story.

So, it's a story of a Vietnam vet, as you mentioned, 70 years old, falls on hard times, ends up in a retirement home, um, and thinks his life is over when he gets a wild idea to reunite a band that he had had that was really successful in their youth.

And he pulls together this band after 50 years.

And they go on a wild ride.

And along the way they impact a lot of people in a very wonderful way.

So for instance he's in a retirement home and older people who are very often ignored by family and others um start to be recognized for what they had done in their life.

They help a PSTD uh really sort of uh incapacitated veteran come back to society.

They help a young hotshot physician learn the innuences of being in a band.

They just pull a lot of people on this kind of wonderful journey.

Sam, there's a lot of emotional depth in this book, but there's also an undercurrent of humor and sarcasm.

Is that who you are?

Uh, I think probably, you know, I I appreciate you saying that.

People seem to enjoy that a lot and I think that's what helps tell this story because there are some very emotional parts to the story.

Yeah, very um you know and a lot of that came from very direct personal experience.

So for instance, my mother who was close to a hundred and ended up in a retirement home was sharp as attack.

And I'd go visit her and I would literally, this is in the book, walk by a line of very old people in wheelchairs with their chins down and not communicating and everybody just walked by them.

One day my sister discovered one of them had been a journalist at the Nermberg trials.

I thought wow.

And then we suddenly began talking to him and learned about this incredible life.

And similarly in the book there are several characters like that who are being just totally ignored who ended up when you investigated had really vibrant lives.

The book also, as you said, looks at PTSD directly at it, and for many, that is a lifetime struggle.

I'm curious if your experience with veterans, particularly Vietnam vets, helped to shape that.

Very much so.

Thank you for asking that question.

Um, I was involved for some time with a group called Vets Helping Heroes.

And we supplied dogs for vets that had severe PTSD or physical in inabilities, learned a lot about them, particularly the Vietnam vets, because, you know, they were treated so badly when they came back and they still suffer greatly.

So, I wanted to incorporate that in the book.

So, the main character, Mick, is a Vietnam vet, and he helps a younger Afghanistan vet who lost his leg and has been unable to bring himself back into society.

It was a very big theme for me.

Yeah.

Aging is also a a theme, as we said, and you say it so well in the acknowledgement, and I I'm I'm going to paraphrase what you said, but that everyone has a story.

People in senior facilities, like you said, are so easy just to walk past, but take a beat, at least meet them, appreciate them, learn their story.

Yeah, that happened to me several times.

One was an occasion when I was walking in a park and a woman was wheeling her mother in a wheelchair.

I was talking to the woman and saying nothing to the mother and then she casually mentioned that her mother had escaped the Warsaw Ghetto.

My god.

I mean, how often do you meet somebody who lived through that?

And her mother had this incredible story.

And it was it's that kind of thing that sparked that theme in the in the book.

I wanted to be I wanted that to be very prominent.

If you could sit down with any of the characters that you wrote in this book, who would it be?

Danny.

This is Danny.

That's the character who was a wild, crazy, funny uh guitar player who while the other band members had moved on in life, he'd never been able to separate himself from playing.

And he went on to drugs and women and a wild life, but he's a lovable character and a fabulous musician patterned very much after uh the guitar player in my band who was just a fabulous character.

And I really wanted to memorialize him.

In the story and in life, music can be very healing.

What does music mean to you?

Oh my god.

I always think it's the purest form of energy.

That's well said.

It it can music can be anything.

Music can take you to great heights of happiness, great depths of sorrow, and you can get lost in it very easily.

And I think it impacts everyone in what's going on in their life at that moment.

And um it's it's a very difficult single entity to define, but for me it's just been a hallmark of my life and I'm very grateful to have been able to have had it.

And in the book, you have a character that builds a guitar with some pretty unusual materials, which I want you to talk about, but what's the weirdest material you've ever used to build a musical instrument?

Well, I actually built the instruments described in the book.

I have them.

And that happened because I had gone to a blues concert and I saw this uh 80-year-old man from the Mississippi Delta playing a guitar made of a gasoline can.

So, I thought that was I should have had that something like that for my act.

But, um, what happens in the book is that this uh when Mick, the lead character, is forced into a retirement home and he's quite uh depressed and thinks he'll never adapt, uh, has his prized possession, his guitar, accidentally destroyed.

And now he's even more depressed until he gets this crazy idea to build a guitar out of a bed pan which he finds almost a perfect fit for the body of a guitar and does it and ends up with a great sounding guitar and then he gets all excited about reactivating his life and that's their hook.

There's that's a bit another theme of the book is is a hook.

All bands need a hook to succeed.

You know, the Beatles had their hair and uh the Stones had MC Jagger and um Elvis had his his hips and they never had a hook when they were young.

So, they never went anywhere because they were competing with the Beatles and other big bands.

Well, if the bed pan guitar doesn't do it, I don't know what I don't know either.

That was the hook.

The book is full circle.

Sam Beertock, this has been such a pleasure.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm Anne Bok.

Please join me on the next Between the Covers.