Martin McGovern

Martin McGovern

About

The Octogenarian Ski-jumper is a celebration of the achievements of the famous and not-so-famous, arranged according to the age of the person at the time of the achievement. Chapters for those aged 20 to 69 are available here: the full book contains achievements of those ranging from newborns to centenarians. I've been writing nearly all of my professional life; the first piece I ever wrote was a travel article for a company magazine, when I visited in Albania in 1988. I also was the author of Microsoft's initial document on how to apply patches to computers; it made the top ten on their download site. 

A Shadow in Yucatan

A Shadow in Yucatan

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<p>A mythical jewel of a story… A true story told on a beach in Yucatan, A Shadow tells Stephanie's story but it was also the story of the golden time. Its nostalgia sings like cicadas in the heat.</p><p>An American ‘Under Milkwood’, this distilled novel of the Sixties evokes the sounds, music and optimism on the free-wheelin streets and parks of Coconut Grove. You can hear Bob Dylan still strumming acoustic; smoke a joint with Fred Neil; and Everybody’s Talkin is carried on the wind.</p><p>Stephanie, a young hairdresser living in lodgings finds herself pregnant. Refused help from her hard Catholic mother in New York, unable to abort her baby, she accepts the kindness of Miriam, her Jewish landlady, whose own barren life spills into compassionate assistance for the daughter she never had.</p><p>The poignancy of its ending, its generosity and acceptance, echoes the bitter disappointment of those of us who hoped for so much more, but who remember its joy, and its promise, as though untarnished by time.</p>

Story Behind The Book

On my wife's forty-fourth birthday, our son had chicken pox and we couldn't go to a party. Uncharacteristically, she was bemoaning this misfortune. &quot;And I'm forty-four&quot; she said. &quot;No-one ever achieved anything aged forty-four&quot;. This chapter is one of the results of that conversation.

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