Mothers Hurling Bricks

Bill Nemmers' first novel, Crude, examined the political and financial absurdities of North Dakota's recent oil drilling frenzy. This book, Mothers Hurling Bricks, examines a very different absurdity-the U.S. Army's Cold War occupation of West Germany. The Heidelberg-based expatriate Czech rock band, The Mothers Hurling Bricks, honors the Prague women who, in a frustrated act of violence, hurled loosened paving bricks back at Soviet tanks which were rumbling through Prague's streets on August 10, 1968. The author, a U.S. soldier in Heidelberg, knew the band members, and knew the band's name honored all mothers-his own certainly included-who at times must need to hurl things at machines to protest the absurdity of modern mechanized warfare.