Why to Kill a Billionaire is the story of how Jay Sam Guy a.k.a. Noel Bodie a.k.a. Al Pearsons comes to learn about the hidden forces that are enslaving humanity, his relationship to those forces, and his struggle to prevent it from happening. In the process, he learns that he is a lot more like a couple of his family members than he had ever realized, and the realization is both comforting and troubling. From his point of view, America and the world will never be the same again.
Author Biography
Obi is a native of Chicago, Illinois. He joined the Perspectivists Writers' Guild around 1997. In the late 1960s, he studied writing with Marjorie Peters and Pierre Long at their workshop in Hyde Park. In the early 1970s, he studied fiction writing with Hoyt Fuller as a member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) Writers' Workshop. His first publication was a philosophical essay in Black World Magazine in October, 1973. He has written four novels, The Last and Final King, A Feast of Peonies, The Reward of the Fool and Why to Kill a Billionaire. He has a collection of short stories entitled Satan's Anvil, and a stage play published in book form entitled A Lake of Fire. Obi graduated from Hyde Park High School in 1960 and served in the U.S. Air Force until 1964. He did his basic training at Lackland Air Force Base (AFB) in San Antonio, Texas, then went for further training at Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo, Texas. He was stationed in Darmstadt, Germany, for three years working in intelligence. After a short return to the U.S. where he worked at several odd jobs, he spend 15 months traveling in Europe where he hitch-hiked from Lapland in Scandinavia to Morocco in North Africa working along the way at a variety of jobs from farm hand to factory worker to dishwasher to carpenter's assistant, mainly in Sweden and Germany. His international travels have taken him to Oslo, Norway; Stockholm, Sweden; Copenhagen, Denmark; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Paris, France; Cologne, Germany; Barcelona, Spain; and Tangier, Morocco. Upon his return to the United States, he attended the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he majored in Philosophy and minored in English. He did further graduate work and later attended the John Marshall Law School, earning a Juris Doctor degree. He currently practices as a civil rights and criminal defense attorney. He has been active in third-party politics, and is currently a civil rights activist with the Illinois Coalition Against Torture (ICAT), the Illinois Campaign to End the New Jim Crow (ICENJC), and the National Alliance Against Racial and Political Repression (NAARPR). He is married with seven children and three grandchildren. His hobbies include photography, yoga, meditation and traveling with his family and their travel trailer. He and his family have camped throughout North America. He currently works and lives on the south side of Chicago.
