All Companions Sink (November 2013) is Bob Laird's fourth novel, taking up the story of Marlon Brando Plover, the main character in Not That Far, Laird's second novel, eleven years later when Plover has somehow become director of admissions at UC Berkeley. The novel opens on the day in July 1995 that the University of California Regents end affirmative action in UC Admissions. Partly comic in tone, the book is the story of an important institution under great legal and political pressure and the acts of betrayal, cowardice, and, occasionally, courage that result as Plover is forced to confront the competing factions and often unstable individuals within that bureaucracy.
About the Author: All Companions Sink (November 2013) is Bob Laird's fourth novel. Laird began writing fiction in 1978 during annual two-month summer furloughs from UC Berkeley. He completed a draft of The Grantee, his first novel, in 1979 and then Not That Far in 1983 and Put Out in 1987. With each book, he piled up rejections from agents and publishers, went into prolonged sulks, and then continued working on the manuscripts while he focused on helping to raise a family and being an aggressive advocate for affirmative action in the public policy and legal struggles in California and the United States. Growing up in Oakland, Laird graduated from Oakland Technical High School and attended what was then Oakland City College. He transferred to UC Santa Barbara, where he completed a BA in physical education (1962) and an MA in English (1965). He then taught English for three years at Long Beach City College before receiving a Fulbright Grant to teach American literature in Denmark. After a second year in Europe, he taught English and physical education for two years at Alhambra High School in Martinez, California. He then enrolled at Bjorn's Hairstyling Academy in Vallejo and subsequently worked as an apprentice hairdresser at Kenny's Workshop in Oakland and then as a hairdresser at The Raven in Berkeley. In 1977, Laird went to work for the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent 22 years in admissions and outreach, serving as director of undergraduate admission from 1993 until his retirement in 1999. While at UC Berkeley, he was a frequent presenter at national admissions conferences. Following his retirement from Berkeley, Laird worked for ten years as an independent consultant on higher education admissions policy and wrote extensively on admissions and equity issues, including The Case for Affirmative Action in University Admissions, published in 2005 by Bay Tree Publishing. His work has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Sacramento Bee, the San Francisco Chronicle, and National CrossTalk, among other places. He lives in Berkeley with his spouse Karen Rice. They have two sons, Sam, 28, a journalist for Mashable.com, and Casey, 24, currently traveling in Turkey.