Publisher's Synopsis
The ability of nation states to author the life-stories of extraordinary people is exemplified by how America figuratively penned the fascinating and contemporaneous life-stories of two amazing immigrants from opposite ends of Ireland, and opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum.
Inspired by the creative talent of Broadway musical legend, Stephen Sondheim, in the year of his passing, Side by Side by America juxtaposes the modern impact of two lives that contemporaneously spanned one of the most important phases in the development of modern America and the world, and creates the basis for a conciliatory understanding of deep-rooted political divides. Though their paths never crossed, Sam Bayne and Mary Harris Jones (aka Mother Jones) shared many of the same entrepreneurial traits of risk-taking and optimism in the face of adversity. The industrialists held responsible by Mother Jones for the dire plight of blue-collar working populations across nineteenth and early twentieth century America, were the same people whom Sam Bayne rose to number among his friends and associates. Mentioned in both autobiographies, albeit from inverse perspectives, are the Rockefellers, who sent J D Rockefeller Junior to learn the ropes of business under Sam Bayne's tutelage, and J P Morgan, whose banking empire would eventually absorb Bayne's Seaboard Banking network into today's J P Morgan Chase conglomerate. Introducing the D-Book Format, Side by Side by America aspires to incentivize lapsed readers back into the book-reading environment, and to improve the readability of some of the most amazing books ever written. By re-editing the layout of text in a way that improves readability, especially for people who may suffer silently from a "reading stutter", the D-Book Format creates a platform that facilitates the development, improvement and maintenance of a fluent reading style. Reading has an athletic quality to it, in that people who read on a daily basis for career or recreational reasons, are very good at it, while people who rarely read for any length of time, never reach their full reading potential. The D-Book Series provides an accessible fluency training platform for reading, and combines this with some truly fascinating stories and life-stories. Apart from the entertainment value of reading, and the career benefits of maintaining a proficient level of reading fluency, neurological research has established the cognitive benefits of reading, in terms of both higher brain functionality, and the neuroplasticity associated with cognitively assigning meaning, context and emotion to words laid out in two-dimensional sentence structures. Because the human visual pathways developed as a three-dimensional mechanism designed to respond rapidly to existential threats, many of the athletic skills involved in developing a fluent reading style, are about adapting to the two-dimensional environment of words on a page. The acquired "reflexes of reading", include "word recognition", "new line positioning", "directionality", "chunking word groups", "chunking sentences", "endurance" and the many cognitive responses that attribute meaning in real time, and apportion a "genre" context, whether work or leisure related. The number of people who have ADHD and who also have dyslexia, suggests that the ability to concentrate, while the basic skills of reading are being developed, forms a crucial part of learning to read as a coherent fluent process. ADHD tends to be picked up earlier in boys than in girls, but research suggests that boys and girls with the ADHD trait, are equally prone to having severe reading fluency issues. The inattentive neurochemistry underlying an association between the ADHD trait and dyslexia, exerts its influence at a critical time in the education cycle, and can limit the career options of some highly intelligent young people.
