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Inlandia Institute is proud to announce the publication of Scouts’ Honor by Carlos E. Cortés!
Please join us for a book launch and celebration of Scouts’ Honor by Carlos E. Cortés on Sunday, August 31, from 1:00-3:30 PM. The program will be held at the Civil Rights Institute of Inland Southern California, 3933 Mission Inn Ave in Riverside. All are welcome.
Dr. Cortés will be joined by esteemed professors John M. Ganim and Richard T. Rodríguez from the University of California, Riverside, for a conversation you won’t want to miss.
(And mark your calendar for a second Scouts’ Honor event at the Maloof Foundation in Rancho Cucamonga on September 20!)
Refreshments will be served. Admission to both events is FREE, but an RSVP is requested: https://tinyurl.com/RSVP-ScoutsHonor
About Scouts’ Honor
Dead bodies hadn’t been all that common at Boy Scout Camp Matulia. Nestled in the rugged, forested, relentlessly hilly southwestern corner of Missouri, it was an accident waiting to happen. Consider the odds. Four hundred and fifty young teenagers arriving every other Monday for a twelve-night camping session. Of course, mishaps occurred. The death of Boy Scout Harry Vincent would wreak havoc on the lives of those who tried to put the death behind them.
Reading Scouts’ Honor is like descending into a Hieronymus Bosch painting that has been repurposed for the mid-twentieth-century United States. The story begins in 1948 with the discovery of a young teenager’s dead body at a Midwestern Boy Scout summer camp. The novel then develops as a raucous coming-of-age story, a perplexing maybe-murder mystery, a carnival of off-beat characters, and a communal cover-up involving, in some cases, reluctant collaborators.
Praise for Scouts’ Honor
Scouts’ Honor is a fascinating look at the culture of teenage boys just after World War Il in the Midwest. Many of us grew up in Carlos’s world, which he portrays in both a disturbing and endearing way. His insights into the American condition are bottomless. – Marc Brenman, When Hate Groups March Down Main Street: Engaging a Community Response
This fast-paced mystery involving four Boy Scouts at summer camp raises thorny ethical questions of contemporary relevance. The scouts’ loyalties to each other collide with truth-telling about the death of one of the four. On my own honor, this is an intelligent, thought-provoking, timely book that you’ll enjoy from start to finish. – Ellen Summerfield, author of Motherwise: an anthology of poems
Carlos E. Cortés is the Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside. His books include his memoir, Rose Hill: An Intermarriage before Its Time and an award-winning book of poetry, Fourth Quarter: Reflections of a Cranky Old Man. Cortés served as Cultural Consultant for the Dreamworks film, “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” and received the 2009 NAACP Image Award for being the Creative/Cultural Advisor for Nickelodeon’s “Dora the Explorer” and “Go, Diego, Go!.” He also travels the country performing his one-person autobiographical play, “A Conversation with Alana: One Boy’s Multicultural Rite of Passage.”
John Ganim began teaching at UCR in 1974, and retired in 2022 as a Distinguished Professor of English. He is the author of four books and over 60 articles and book chapters on medieval literature and how the Middle Ages is represented in political thought, architecture and cinema. He was the 113th President of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (2015-16) and has served as President (2006-2008) of the New Chaucer Society. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2004. Two panels were held in his honor at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2022 and a special issue of the journal Literature Compass was dedicated to his work and influence. He was the 2023-2024 Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor, a chair previously held by Carlos E. Cortés.
Richard T. Rodríguez is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (2009) and A Kiss across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad (2022), both published by Duke University Press. The author of numerous articles about Latinx cultural expression and politics, he is currently working on two books as well as finishing a collection of poems about his time living in Chicago.
