Rebecca has a husband Jim, three children Eve, Mary and Adam, a brother Bas and (due to a family feud) an estranged sister Bettina and a few acquaintances in her immediatie social circles. Rooted in goodwill and pleasant views of the world, Rebecca reports all her and her families activities each year, faithfully in her eyes, and sails on to keep improving the world regardless of adversity.Told in a series of Christmas letters it is the story of Rebecca, twelve years in her life and the lives of her close family. It is a work of mainstream fiction for the adult market, a succinct and witty outpouring designed to entertain and amuse. The ideal gift book.The Shoethrowers is a book for people who do not buy books, and everyone else.After thousands of years of evolutionary development the sure but steady building of the middle of our society has been rudely halted and severely reversed. The dream of everyone being in the middle, doing the same things, liking the same things, believing in the same things for the benefit of everyone else is crumbling. No poor, no rich, just comfort and pleasantness for all. Not just the fault of excessive law makers, banking soothsayers and inconsistent social gurus, but the very biology of mankind is in action where selection of the fittest constantly erodes the middle and lower ends of the population. Crisis and fiscal easing only further exacerbate the erosion. The middle of our society is falling in to the sea, eroded by their constant tendency to scrabble to the top of the cliff, their continuous trampling upwards, downwards and sideways has removed the surface vegetation and the very ground on which the middle is built crumbles, falls and is washed away by the downpours of social rain.The whole middle people s coast line is being removed with every tide of the politician s mood swings and is being deposited further along the coastline as mud flats and sandbanks, featureless, non-productive, and useless and a danger to shipping.With inheritances dwindling, good schools the preserve of the super-rich, protected civil servants, employees of out-dated government sponsored institutions and sectarian religious interest groups, the ordinary middle of society has become stranded, isolated and desolated. Its body and the very soul of the middle are being eaten away by the swirling vultures of the big banks, bureaucrats, greedy national government(s) and car repair bills.There is no way down to the glamorous level of the wealthy twenty four hour plumber, no way down to the complete contented life style of the lower levels where aspirations of escape are not encouraged, not attainable and not worth the effort. No way up to the internet get rich quick, leaders of the big banks and other people who steal or that guess about what to do with someone else s money. No way up to the closed elite of the state sponsored institutions living off self-awarded expenses, the secret secular hierarchies, and the self-appointed government leaders who can continually reward themselves with an ever improving life style and fiddling by means of unwritten rules.Trends in biology are changeable but never reversible; the middle of our society is on course for extinction. Its futile attempts at continuous improvement for the benefit of what they perceive that the neighbours think will cease to have any value. Within a few generations there will be no middle; just the high government sponsored elite living in fenced compounds owned by international bankers surrounded by the low proletariat scavenging for scraps around the electrified perimeter. Being a member of the middle will no longer be experienced or remembered, another dinosaur era will disappear into the fossil layers.Time is running out, we can no longer sit back and wait. It is vitally important to accurately record and lay down the life of those in the middle of society before it is too late, and authoritative book is just a beginning.This book is a work of fiction, intended only to amuse. Any resemblance to any reality, persons living or dead and any event anywhere is purely coincidental and unintentional.