Chris Truscott

If the North Had Won the Civil War is two alternate history novels in one. The modern story follows Stonewall Jackson "Jack" Sawyer, a history professor in the modern-day Confederate States of America, and his alternate history "If the North Had Won the Civil War" in a nation where publication of his book is a criminal offense. The story gives the listener a look at a nightmarish modern-day Confederacy where any person with a drop of black blood in his veins is denied basic human rights and confined to a "Preserve".

Is there life after baseball? Starting from this simple question, The Wax Pack ends up with something much bigger and unexpected - a meditation on the loss of innocence and the gift of impermanence, for both Brad Balukjian and the former ballplayers he tracked down. To get a truly random sample of players, Balukjian followed this wildly absurd but fun-as-hell premise: he took a single pack of baseball cards from 1986 (the first year he collected cards), opened it, chewed the nearly 30-year-old gum inside, gagged, and then embarked on a quest to find all the players in the pack.