This is a love story steeped in horror, heartbreak, hardship, healing and hope. It’s the on-going saga of a brilliant family of three lead by an army of one — a renaissance man who imploded almost five years ago on the eve of his greatest success; a man the medical community declared doomed, deemed a brilliant mind trapped inside a broken, unmendible body; a diagnosis which indomitable determination on the part of all three, would, these years later, prove untrue.

At the dawn of this century Michael Shacker was at work on numerous books, a few of them for 20 years or more. He was a science writer, an environmentalist, a philosophical historian, and at the bottom of it all — a humanist who believed that no problem caused by man was not also solvable by man. Like Buckminster Fuller, Shacker was an ever-critical optimist, a gadfly seeking to sting the rump of complacent humanity out of its deadly stupor and into action. A large, joyful man of vast vision, he was not disposed to break off a single piece of a bigger problem; rather he was at work on a global curriculum for all citizens of earth, one which synthesized wisdom of the ages in order to take on the never-more-important concerns of our one world right now. Oddly enough, his 2002 Lyons Press publication A Spring Without Bees: How Colony Collapse Has Endangered Our Food Supply, was, by his standards, rather humble in scope.