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The Crane Dance: Taking Flight in Midlife

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The Crane Dance: Taking Flight in Midlife

Like many men today, Bill Finger experienced the perfect storm of job restructuring, shifting gender roles, and a pink slip. With young children, little money, and a fuzzy career vision, he hit an emotional bottom. Only then did he come to grips with long buried grief and guilt as a white Mississippian and Conscientious Objector as well as a family history of depression. He came to realize how his responses to major life transitions had hobbled him in dealing with fatherhood, breadwinning, and vocation. This memoir recounts how he drew on the energies of the men’s movement, the power of the expressive arts, and the quiet force of meditation – along with antidepressants and therapy – to discover a new vitality for the second half of life.

The Crane Dance is available:

In Store

Quail Ridge Books (Raleigh, NC),

Regulator Bookshop, (Durham, NC),

Page 158 Books (Wake Forest, NC),

Online

Indiebound

Amazon (paper and ebook)

IngramSpark (paper)

Smashwords (ebook)

William R. Finger

William (Bill) Finger grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from Duke University in 1969, he went to India as a Peace Corps Volunteer. In midlife, he completed a Masters in Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His first memoir, The Crane Dance: Taking Flight in Midlife (2016), was a finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. He has been editor of a public policy quarterly, a consultant at the N.C. Legislature, and for the last 24 years before retirement, a writer and communications manager at an international public health organization. Since 1977, he has lived with his wife in the Raleigh, North Carolina, area, where they raised their two children.