A Brief Review of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night" by Chuck Trunks (Trunks Art)

Nampa, Idaho - March 8, 2026 - Google summarizes its definition of the Lost Generation, a term coined by Gertrude Stein, as the generation who came of age during World War I. With what we know of the conflict and its aftermath, it isn’t hard to understand how these young adults—especially in France and Italy—became spiritually adrift, deeming pre-war moral and traditional values as no longer relevant. Whereas Stein, an American writer and poet living in Paris, identified the social movement, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald popularized it in The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Tender Is the Night (1934).

I finished reading Tender Is the Night—one of only four Fitzgerald novels—a week earlier, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. Similar to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald’s story centers around complicated and deeply flawed American expatriates living in post-war Europe. However, Fitzgerald’s characters are more aristocratic, intellectual, and refined—yet they still pursue what everyone wants: acceptance for their true selves and romantic love. What results is a timeless tale—one relatable even in today’s screen-rich society. Whether you see yourself in one or more of the characters or are drawn to the complexity of their misgivings, Tender Is the Night offers a haunting, unforgettable descent into the gilded world of the restless elite.

If you can get through Fitzgerald’s pedantic attentiveness to cultural details, poetic prose, and uneven pacing, you’ll be rewarded with a rich story that—if you’re like me—will make you believe we’re living among several lost generations right now.

-Chuck Trunks

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All my books can be found on Amazon. 💓💓💓

Trunks Art moved from Columbia, South Carolina, to Nampa, Idaho, in 2025 and has made this city his home and writing inspiration.

To see more of my work, please have a look at more posts or email me at chucktrunks@gmail.com. Or, visit my website at www.trunksart.com.  Also, you can find me on Instagram (chucktrunks) and Facebook (Chuck Trunks).

NEW STORY coming this spring: "Pillars of Society" by Chuck Trunks (Trunks Art)!

Nampa, Idaho - March 4, 2026 - Do you know what the United States of Private Equity Firms needs right now? A lower cost of living? Non-profit health care? A government that actually represents the interests of its taxpayers? Nope. It needs an allegorical tale of personal transcendence as told through the interactions between four fuzzy caterpillars. Carl, Bethany, Fitz, and Sigmund live and work in a colony located in a secluded pond surrounded by wetland trees and dotted with water lilies. Each represents one of four distinct, survivalist responses to crumbling capitalism and the ascent of fascism.

All my books can be found on Amazon. 💓💓💓

Trunks Art moved from Columbia, South Carolina, to Nampa, Idaho, in 2025 and has made this city his home and writing inspiration.

To see more of my work, please have a look at more posts or email me at chucktrunks@gmail.com. Or, visit my website at www.trunksart.com.  Also, you can find me on Instagram (chucktrunks) and Facebook (Chuck Trunks).

"A Rationale for Being" by Chuck Trunks offers an escape route from the United States of Dystopia. This is Trunks Art's ninth book.

Nampa, Idaho - February 25, 2026 - An excerpt from Chapter 4 - "It's less about convincing people of my interpretation of the grand design and more about helping them understand their feelings about what I shared regarding the body and mind. I'm not trying to win a popularity contest. I'm trying to kick-start a billion or more internal conversations so that they, too, can discover the last remaining escape route."

Back cover:

There was a time when I felt safe—shielded from what lurks within the underbelly of a society predicated on corruption, exploitation, and manipulation. “I’m too smart, too aware, to be seduced by the ruling class’s lies,” I’d tell myself. But then one day, you wake up and find yourself exactly where you said you’d never be—smack dab in the middle of the spider’s web. Reality hits hard: nobody’s coming to save you. That’s when I realized it was up to me to save myself.

Although packaged within a playfully fictitious storyline acted out in a fifth-grade classroom in Idaho and at CBS Studios in New York City, A Rationale for Being—while utilizing a handful of fascinating scientific facts and well-understood psychological theories presented in the first three chapters of the book—concludes with a philosophical message that offers a way back to what you allowed others to take from you.

A Rationale for Being may be filled with interesting characters, passion, humor, and imagination, but make no mistake—this is the story of how I was able to save myself.

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All my books can be found on Amazon. 💓💓💓

Trunks Art moved from Columbia, South Carolina, to Nampa, Idaho, in 2025 and has made this city his home and writing inspiration.

To see more of my work, please have a look at more posts or email me at chucktrunks@gmail.com. Or, visit my website at www.trunksart.com.  Also, you can find me on Instagram (chucktrunks) and Facebook (Chuck Trunks).

A Brief Review of Bill O'Reilly's "Killing Reagan" by Chuck Trunks (Trunks Art)

Nampa, Idaho - February 23, 2026 - If you like historical events and true-life stories and harbor a secret penchant for the salacious, then Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Series is for you. So far, I’ve read eight of the 13 books, adding Killing Reagan to my list earlier this month. His books always leave me feeling both satisfied and disillusioned: satisfied by newfound knowledge, yet disappointed that his unique insights and writing style have not been more embraced by educators or the media. Prior to reading this book, I assumed I was highly informed about the 40^th President of the United States.

My confidence stemmed from several notable factors: he was the president for half my high school years and all of my college years; he was the governor of California while I was attending elementary school in Los Angeles; I grew up in a Republican-centered family and community; I’ve visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, three times; and (despite his dementia from Alzheimer’s) I said, “Good morning, Mr. President,” to him from 10 feet away in Santa Monica in 1996. Yet, nothing in my previous experiences could have prepared me for the shocking revelations in Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Reagan.

I think it’s hard to write stories—especially stories that most people think they’ve already heard. But this is the very essence of Bill O’Reilly’s brilliance. He recounts historical events from unique perspectives that weave both facts and human interests into a framework of masterful storytelling. Can you imagine how daunting it would be if you were asked to write a book about Elvis, John F. Kennedy, or General George Custer? With so much having been written about these iconic individuals, you’d probably tell yourself there’s nothing more to say about them. Not only could Bill O’Reilly write the book and add it to his Killing Series, but he’d also write a New York Times bestseller you couldn’t put down.

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All my books can be found on Amazon. 💓💓💓

Trunks Art moved from Columbia, South Carolina, to Nampa, Idaho, in 2025 and has made this city his home and writing inspiration.

To see more of my work, please have a look at more posts or email me at chucktrunks@gmail.com. Or, visit my website at www.trunksart.com.  Also, you can find me on Instagram (chucktrunks) and Facebook (Chuck Trunks).

"A RATIONALE FOR BEING" by Chuck Trunks (Trunks Art) is on Amazon NOW! This is the author's 9th book.

Nampa, Idaho - February 17, 2026 - Back cover blurb: There was a time when I felt safe—shielded from what lurks within the underbelly of a society predicated on corruption, exploitation, and manipulation. “I’m too smart, too aware, to be seduced by the ruling class’s lies,” I’d tell myself. But then one day, you wake up and find yourself exactly where you said you’d never be—smack dab in the middle of the spider’s web. Reality hits hard: nobody’s coming to save you. That’s when I realized it was up to me to save myself.

Although packaged within a playfully fictitious storyline acted out in a fifth-grade classroom in Idaho and at CBS Studios in New York City, A Rationale for Being—while utilizing a handful of fascinating scientific facts and well-understood psychological theories presented in the first three chapters of the book—concludes with a philosophical message that offers a way back to what you allowed others to take from you.

A Rationale for Being may be filled with interesting characters, passion, humor, and imagination, but make no mistake—this is the story of how I was able to save myself.

- - - - - 

All my books can be found on Amazon. 💓💓💓

Trunks Art moved from Columbia, South Carolina, to Nampa, Idaho, in 2025 and has made this city his home and writing inspiration.

To see more of my work, please have a look at more posts or email me at chucktrunks@gmail.com. Or, visit my website at www.trunksart.com.  Also, you can find me on Instagram (chucktrunks) and Facebook (Chuck Trunks).

A Brief Review of Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" by Chuck Trunks (Trunks Art)

Nampa, Idaho - February 15, 2026 - I first encountered Carl Sagan in 1980 via my family’s 19-inch floor console—a TV sturdy enough to withstand a Cold War-era nuclear blast. Cosmos: A Personal Voyage aired weekly on PBS and featured 13 episodes centered around cosmology and its connection to the origin of life. He wasn’t just a renowned astronomer and planetary scientist; he was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author nobly focused on advancing the public’s understanding of science.

I purchased The Demon-Haunted World (1995) thinking he’d written a book warning us what would happen to society if the soon-to-be-extinct scientific mindset—a combination of both wonder and skepticism—wasn’t revitalized within the next 20 or 30 years. Instead, he wrote a book about how the lack of wonder and skepticism allowed outrageous claims made by politicians, bureaucrats, corporations, theologians, and pseudoscientists to proceed unchecked throughout history. It’s a long book that, in my opinion, spends too much time detailing UFO abductions, witch hunts, and religious dogma.

Carl Sagan was an incredibly smart man whose explanation about the importance of books made me a lifelong reader; however, I struggled to finish The Demon-Haunted World, thinking I should’ve started with one of his more popular books, Cosmos or Contact. 

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All my books can be found on Amazon. 💓💓💓

Trunks Art moved from Columbia, South Carolina, to Nampa, Idaho, in 2025 and has made this city his home and writing inspiration.

To see more of my work, please have a look at more posts or email me at chucktrunks@gmail.com. Or, visit my website at www.trunksart.com.  Also, you can find me on Instagram (chucktrunks) and Facebook (Chuck Trunks).

A Brief Review of Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" by Chuck Trunks (Trunks Art)

Nampa, Idaho - February 10, 2026 - Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) was published 100 years ago, and yet, I found myself reading a story that could’ve been written yesterday—that is, if you could pretend that 30 years of excessive busyness and screen time didn’t dumb down America, unplugging human connection and erasing any semblance of what we used to call “community.” The premise of the story is extraordinarily simple—a group of friends travel from France to Spain to enjoy a week-long festival in Pamplona; however, each of Hemingway’s main characters is complicated, self-defeating, and deeply flawed—just like me and anyone else who doesn’t lie to themselves.  

 

Set in Europe at a time when the populace was beginning to feel far enough away from the aftermath of WW1 to begin enjoying life again, The Sun Also Rises offers a firsthand account of the author’s adventurous and tumultuous life as an overseas expatriate. Of course, the book is categorized as literary fiction, but how could it not be autobiographical when he describes everything in such vivid detail? I kept saying to myself, “He had to have been there—doing those things—with those people.” And sure enough, after a brief internet search, I found pictures of Hemingway sitting with friends in a crowded Spanish café and tempting fate as an amateur bullfighter in Pamplona—both from 1925. But that isn’t why I loved his first novel.

 

I connected with The Sun Also Rises because I could see my own flaws in not only one or two of his main characters but in all of them, reducing me from a passive reader to a hapless voyeur, devouring a hedonistic storyline chock full of debauchery, impulsiveness, insecurity, pettiness, and promiscuity. Hemingway is famous for his signature narrative style, but he was a master at understanding base human nature, which, apparently, hasn’t changed much—if at all—in the last 100 years or so.

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All my books can be found on Amazon. 💓💓💓

Trunks Art moved from Columbia, South Carolina, to Nampa, Idaho, in 2025 and has made this city his home and writing inspiration.

To see more of my work, please have a look at more posts or email me at chucktrunks@gmail.com. Or, visit my website at www.trunksart.com.  Also, you can find me on Instagram (chucktrunks) and Facebook (Chuck Trunks).