Quiet Riots

Contemporary America's news headlines are chopped full of explosions of violence that seem to emerge from out of nowhere. From Steven Kazmierczak at Northern Illinois; Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech; Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood; to Andrew Joseph Stack III's terrorist attack on the IRS Building in Austin, more and more seemingly well-adjusted Americans appear to be releasing misplaced, pent up rage upon an unsuspecting public. However, in Quiet Riots, sociologist Dr. Kareem R. Muhammad uses his first novel to paint a vivid picture of how these events are not nearly as isolated or random as they appear. In Quiet Riots, the novel's protagonist, Victor Armstrong, sees his perfectly normal, yuppified life turned totally upside down by forces that he can't quite grasp. After years of suffering silently while he feels himself being slowly eaten away by a series of unforeseen tragedies that see him go from promising attorney to convict, Victor ultimately reaches his breaking point and lashes out in a way that was personally unpredictable but socially all too familiar. In Quiet Riots, Dr. Kareem R. Muhammad skillfully examines the psyche of the new, 21st-century styled silent majority who are just one fragile thread away from reaching their own breaking points. By peeling away some of the layers at the heart of this silent frustration, he leaves readers to ponder their own private, quiet riots and how we collectively go about properly extinguishing these internal fires that threaten to engulf the entire nation.