Finding Billy Battles: An Account of Peril, Transgression, and Redemption (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781494854447)

Ronald E. Yates is a former award-winning foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and Dean Emeritus of the College of Media at the University of Illinois where he was also a Professor of Journalism. He is the author of Finding Billy Battles, the first in a trilogy of novels published Nov. 2013. The Kikkoman Chronicles: A Global Company with A Japanese Soul, published by McGraw-Hill. His books also include Aboard The Tokyo Express: A Foreign Correspondent's Journey Through Japan, a collection of columns translated into Japanese, as well as three journalism textbooks: The Journalist's Handbook, International Reporting and Foreign Correspondents, and Business and Financial Reporting in a Global Economy. Yates lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in Japan, Southeast Asia and Latin America where he covered several major stories including the fall of South Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975, the 1989 Tiananmen Square tragedy in Beijing, and revolutions in Nicaragua, El Salvador an Guatemala. He is a graduate of the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas. Author's Note: Finding Billy Battles is a work of "faction." That is, the story it tells is based partly on fact, but it has been augmented with narrative fiction. Many of the protagonists in the story were actual persons, and some of the incidents actually happened. However, other characters and events in the book are fictional. In telling the saga of Billy Battles, I have mined my family's history and the stories I heard various family members tell while I was growing up in my native state of Kansas, a place rife with a rich Native American and immigrant history. It is, and was, a place filled with fascinating characters-especially those men and women of the past who worked so hard to transform what people once called the Great American Desert into one of the most productive regions on the planet. I have also attempted to stay true to the vernacular of the time and place, especially late nineteenth-century Kansas. The reader will notice, therefore, a difference in the tone, mood, and colloquial language that Billy Battles uses to tell his story from the way a contemporary individual might speak. Fortunately, I can recall with reasonable accuracy the way relatives, most now deceased, spoke and behaved as I was reaching adulthood in Kansas.