The latest Great American series by Kevin Bartelme is Wilhelm Reich, a scientist whose many disparate enemies included Adolph Hitler, Sigmund Freud, the governments of Nazi Germany, Norway, and Great Britain, Albert Einstein, J. Edgar Hoover, and his estranged wife Ilsa (not Hoover’s, but that’s another story) among others. In fact, it was she who buttressed his belief in flying saucers by throwing so many at him for his numerous extra-marital affairs. Now, for the first time in print, the true story of Reich comes to light in a brisk, yet heart-rending chronicle of betrayal and redemption.

Reich, published in 2012, is a biographical fiction of an Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. In 1956, the US government ordered all of Wilhelm Reich's books, journals, and other papers, six tons in all, seized and burned in the Gansevoort Incinerator[1] in New York City. Possession of any of Reich's works was declared illegal, a blatant violation of the first amendment that went unchallenged for more than a decade until City Lights, an independent bookstore and publisher in San Francisco, republished The Mass Psychology of Fascism in response to the war in Viet Nam. It was around this time that Bartelme was engaged in anti-war protests. The idea of ​​writing Reich was realized more than 40 years later.