About Guy Butler

Stemming from the ancient Greek legend, a Gordian knot is a metaphor for a problem that looks unsolvable until a clear mind thinks outside the box. There is a story about a bread truck that cannot deliver to a Scottish village because the railway bridge is a couple of inches too low for it to pass beneath. The men of the village are resigned to unloading the bread and carting it home when a five-year-old boy suggests they let the air out of the tires. Voila, problem solved.

Chez Orlowski is blessed with such a mind. Because of circumstance, his schooling was extremely limited but his intelligence is loaded with street smarts from his days in the German labor camps. There are frequent incidents in A Gordian Web where Chez is able to create opportunity out of apparent disaster.

The culmination of the plot pits his innate survival skills against an incredible moral fortitude.

From Weimar, his family escaped to Poland where his stepmother exchanged his birth certificate to keep her own son out of the labor camps, substituting Chez in his place. So when he reached maturity and the genes from both his natural parents kicked in to give him freakish athletic abilities, he remembered his friend, Sebastian, and fought the Third Reich on his own terms. Under the Media Tab of this web page, there is a free download called Adolescence Verboten which explains everything.

Anyone from Northern Ireland will have no problem figuring out this puzzle. One of the bravest men ever to fight in the British Army was Lieutenant Colonel “Paddy” Blair Maine from Newtownards. He led the SAS with a fearless ferocity and could easily have been awarded an unprecedented four Victoria Crosses. Politics reduced the awards to Distinguished Service Orders, one of only seven servicemen to receive the award four times. He was also awarded the Legion d’honneur and the Croix de Guerre.

I was born in Blackpool, England, just after the War and grew up with rationing in a fervently proud family that fought the Nazis. The history I relate is the history I grew up with before emigrating to the United States.

I have left numerous references at the end of A Gordian Web for readers to follow to their own conclusions. It is important to remember that the Allies were war weary and everyone wanted to get back to the business of peace and raising babies. Hitler’s death in the bunker was simply too easy for everyone to accept and when the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were finally released for independent DNA testing in the 1970s, both skulls were found to be female.

I joined British Mensa when I was twenty and the membership rolled into American Mensa where I am now a life member. The requirements for British Mensa involve taking six supervised independent IQ exams; the average score has to exceed a certain number of points.

Now I cannot even remember where my car keys are half the time so it’s a good thing I joined when I did.

I used to be a very active member in the Central Florida Chapter but it has been a while since I attended a meeting. All in all, I found the membership to be enlightened with a strong focus on non-materialistic issues.

The Mensa Bulletin wrote a nice review of Balls of Leather and Steel last year.