Interview with Michael Kasenow, author of The Last Paradise

Topics of conversation:

• Mini history lesson about 1900 Galveston, Texas hurricane (8000 people died)
• Jim Crow era
• Modern day connection to Wall Street
• Facts about current United States water crisis

Michael Kasenow is a survivor of an abusive and brutal childhood. Embarrassed as an adolescent because he couldn't read or write, it was in the eighth grade when he would “slip away from his friends” into the middle school library to read poetry.

He began to travel across America—“patching up wounds, learning through experience.” He worked a series of odd jobs from Michigan to Texas to New Mexico: cab driver, bartender, lumberman, janitor, butcher, and rancher, to name a few. “Living among a variety of unique personalities—the enchanted, the mystical—vagabonds, drifters and an occasional thief.” These experiences add a level of authenticity to his written work. In the early 1980s he taught himself mathematics.

He earned his BS in Geology from Eastern Michigan University in 1986 and eventually obtained an MS and a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University. He has taught geology and hydrogeology at EMU since 1989. His publications include 14 books on the subject of groundwater analysis, and he has over fifty publications that include books, monographs and software. Most of his scientific work has been published by Water Resources Publications, out of Colorado. He has established himself as an innovator in the field of groundwater analysis, developing over fifty pragmatic equations. “Not bad for someone with no math or science ability.”

He's been writing literature since the 10th grade. He’s working on another novel, more poems and “science stuff”. He travels to learn and lives in Michigan. “I’m enjoying watching my son grow. He’s a special wild flower.”

The Last Paradise: A Novel
Michael Kasenow
iUniverse (2009)
ISBN 9781440120015

Synopsis: Glorious in scope, The Last Paradise follows the downtrodden and oppressed people of Galveston, Texas, through trials of injustice and bigotry in post-Civil War America. Novelist Michael Kasenow artfully weaves a tapestry of vivid and historic detail in this inspiring story of strength and survival.

During the beginning of the twentieth century, the alley people in Galveston band together against racism, prejudice, and poverty hidden within the hypocrisy of civic and corporate corruption. Men and women such as Fanny, Maxwell, Newt, Bishop, Elma, the prostitutes and nuns of St. Mary’s, and the puckish poor who hang out at Bleach’s Tavern journey through self-discovery in their attempt to find their places in the changing landscape of a modernizing world.

The men and women of the alley refuse to capitulate to the rich and privileged, drawing instead upon their inner strength and character instilled by their upbringing in frontier America, with its brand of retributive justice that allows them to overcome what is imposed—to be the free men and women demanded by their courageous spirits, even in the midst of turmoil.

Rich with stunning depictions of turn-of-the century Galveston and the devastation wrought by the Great Hurricane of 1900, The Last Paradise illuminates resilience and fortitude of the great city itself, brought about by the same strengths held by its common citizens. Humorous, evocative, and sobering, this breathtaking novel is an adventure that encompasses the human soul.