the idea of disappearing for no reason and rediscovering old interests with the lightness of being a beginner again/no expectations under a new identity is v appealing personally. However, the writing was so boring. ( )

The more time I spent reading “Exit the Rainmaker”, the more intensely I came to dislike its main character, college president Julian Nance Carsey, who in 1982 walked away from a life many would have envied.

Author Jonathan Coleman’s attempts to make sense of this true story and to transmit to the reader a true understanding of what prompted Carsey wallows along for almost 400 pages, and is bloated with a cast of characters who thought they knew the successful and popular “Uncle Jay”.

It all boils down, apparently, to the fact that Carsey, after breaking up the first marriage of the woman who became his wife, tired of her and her ambitions for him, and rather than standing up and saying “I want a divorce”, chose instead to simply leave for work one morning and never return. The first section of the book concentrates on the early search for the missing administrator and on determining whether he had met with foul play or, contrarily, if he had been guilty of some crime and had fled to avoid discovery. When neither of these scenarios proves true, one can only fall back on the reality that he walked away in some Huckleberry Finn odyssey to find “freedom”, regardless of the confidences betrayed and relationships shattered in so doing.

This reader never came to an acceptance that Carsey was emotionally and psychologically running for his life; only that he was tired of being a grown-up and turned his considerable intelligence into an elaborate plan to become a perpetual adolescent. ( )

It is a true story, a biography of Julian Nance Carsey written by Jonathan Coleman. Who Carsey anyway? Jonathan Coleman worked for CBS News in 1981 to 1983. Carsey was a two-year college president who disappeared May 19, 1982. This biography is really about a no body. Carsey didn’t do anything illegal, he just walked away at the age of 47 from his job, his government consulting and his wife and all his friends. This is not a book I would have chosen to read because I guess, I really don’t care. But it is the book for my face to face book club and I try to read them all. It wasn’t hard to read and the question for me was ‘why did the author write this story?’. While it is a biography it also could be considered a sociology study of why would a man walk away. Does the book answer the question. No, I don’t think so, but Coleman’s investigation is thorough and you can come up with your own conclusions. What I always find interesting is how I can read several books at around the same time that seem to have connections. I just finished Rabbit, Run by Updike last month and while one is fiction and the other a true story, they are about the same thing. I also just finished The Art of Fielding which has less in common but both are stories of a college president. ( )