The Sum of His Worth

by Ron Argo

Overview

In this coming-of-age story of love, heroism and murder, a prize-winning author returns to his Alabama childhood during the 1960’s bloody Civil Rights Movement. In the vein of To Kill a Mockingbird, Kirkus Reviews calls the novel “a profound, engrossing … heartbreakingly real novel of the South.”
In the August heat before young Sonny Poe starts ninth grade, he witnesses in the cool nighttime woods the beating and lynching of a black boy. He escapes, but his life is now irrevocably changed.
Sonny lives out the rest of summer in terror of being found out by the town’s agitated KKK. Now desperate for guidance and answers, he latches onto a progressive doctor with a crusading spirit, a man who will turn Sonny’s and his own mysterious life upside down in a tension-fueled thriller of betrayal and corruption that can only end in tragedy—and hope.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940045594332
Publisher:	Ron Argo
Publication date:	07/27/2013
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	543 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ron Argo has been a psych-ward aide, a photographer, a Florida Keys boat captain, an award-winning newspaper reporter, a combat correspondent in LBJ's war, a plumber, carpenter, electrician, all-around jack and restorer of old houses, a would-be musician and artist who can no longer play a guitar with the arthritis. He holds three degrees to include journalism, literature and the MFA; he's gone to jail a time or two in his reckless youth but never had to post bail, been a voter in all elections, except when in Vietnam where the thought was ludicrous. He was never a bartender or preacher. Nor did he ever hold political office, if you don't count chairing a citizen's committee appointed by a board of supervisors to fight corruption over animals, and whose prize-winning newspaper series on that subject helped created the first low-cost spay and neuter clinics in a Southern California city.
He has published one of the more important American war novels of the last century, an epic that one acclaimed critic/academic compared to the works of Mailer, Dos Passos, Jones and Crane.
Argo's only been married twice, so he has no pressing momentum for pumping out promoting book after book, as some novelists must to do to support ex spouses, etc. He has a working, caring wife to assure his maintenance and thus survival.
He is however the author of these fine, award-winning historical and thriller novels, Year of the Monkey, Baby Love, The Courage to Kill and The Sum of His Worth. Other works are in his head and perhaps going down on paper soon as he picks himself up and gets back in the game.
Argo and spouse Mary--children having flown the nest--live in a small and snug community in San Diego where, like Voltaire, he's been there, learned some lessons and now tends his garden.

Editorial Reviews

2014-05-09
In Argo’s (The Courage to Kill, 2013, etc.) novel, set at the dawn of the civil rights movement, an earnest white teenager tries to figure out what kind of man he will become.Growing up fatherless in a cash-strapped Alabama family is hard enough on 16-year-old Sonny Poe. But when he and a buddy accidentally witness a lurid backwoods lynching, things become decidedly more complex. Suddenly, he’s ducking members of the local Ku Klux Klan as he attempts to carry on more mundane pursuits, such as chasing girls, delivering newspapers and saving for a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Into Sonny’s hard-pressed life steps Joe Peach, a local dentist with a painful past and a crusading spirit. “Dr. Joe” takes Sonny under his wing, but Sonny’s secret knowledge of backwoods violence plagues him. The budding friendship becomes more fraught when Dr. Joe is assigned a job to weed out local government corruption. Violence, and the threat of violence, continues to dog Sonny as he and Dr. Joe dig deeper into a police-sanctioned scam targeting the oppressed black community. Will Sonny rise to the challenge? Could any teen in his predicament prevail? In a style that’s evocative of S.E. Hinton’s classic works, with a dash of Daniel Woodrell’s Southern grit, Argo successfully creates a profound, multilayered tapestry that’s full of nuance. Sonny’s first-person perspective creates a fragile aura around the unfolding events and makes them wholly unpredictable; although he’s steadfast and true, Sonny is still a teenager, capable of wrecking his buddy’s car. The authentic dialogue is especially effective; each restrained syllable conveys as much as a five-page soliloquy, as when Sonny, after receiving a horrific beating, says that he’s “[g]ood. Been better, but good.”An engrossing, heartbreakingly real novel of the South.

Kirkus Reviews