To Whom It May Concern:

It is with pleasure I write to you of Mr. Robbins’ original compelling book. “These Precious Days”. It has been my honor to be witness to its development and conclusion.

First and foremost, his distinctive expository style grabs one’s attention from the outset. Terse, bare-bones and powerful, his voice rings with the authenticity of native experience combined with seasoned compassion. This is his world sung in the clipped jargon so distinctive to the region, an intimate and outrageous journal of a man stitched to his heritage but standing observer to the wholly unavoidable cycles of his lifetime. The author has stripped his soul to its basic components, allowing the reader to slip insides his skin, peering out through his heart’s eyes.

The No Sweat quotes and comments that lead into each entry are simply marvelous. I laughed. I cried. I shook my head in amazement. His use of family dynamics as background is superlative, richly confided with no apology. Mr. Robbins’ philosophy of life and its mysterious interweaving are encapsulated with such lavish cynicism and wry wit that I savored them like a fine appetizer to the main course. Pithy and acerbic they sway to the genre of poetic essay and social commentary in the infamous style of Mark Twain, yet expose a warm nature and generous spirit unmarred by aberrant events.

His characterizations are superb, particularly the hilarious nicknames that summate these unique personalities with a decisive zing. These are people struggling on the bottom strata of the local social order, belly-crawling at times, but with a ferocious dignity. It is the story of survival at its basest levels, not just a meager getting-by, but outwitting the system using its own indignities and absurdities to mock it, provoke it and occasionally defeat it while living on the wicked edges of morality and legality. His actors are not elaborate analyses; rather they blithely hint at folks whose coping skills are jungle-acquired, whose adaptations are made to bizarre, unforeseeable twists of fate. Each player possess several faceted attributes of the composite complexity of the author, and when taken as a totality produces an intriguing, fully-developed profile of the Eastern Kentucky good-ole-boy persona; a marijuana grower/pigeon breeder/deep-sea diver, law-defying and touchingly poignant, a devoted family man and loyal friend marrow-deep.

Perhaps the standout feature of this novel is its extraordinary dialogue. Mr. Robbins is a master of this deceivingly difficult aspect, with his dialect hot-n-spicy and stropped razor sharp. His ability to convey the symbolic meta-meaning with brutal (often monosyllabic) brevity is beyond remarkable. To say it is evocative is an understatement. With practiced expertise he sets each scene with the somewhat anticlimactic off-handedness of just-another-day-down-home, only to render the reader surprised, and often shocked, at the outcome. The verbal punch is delivered with a visceral banter that says as much between the lines as outright. His ‘Black Hole’ is heart-wrenchingly relevant in scope and one of the finest psychological sketches I have seen in popular print. Their repartee brims with mutual admiration and a terrible, doomed camaraderie.

Mr. Robbins has painted a portrait of a man caught in the web of his times, a victim turned survivor, a player in the eponymous reality show of hand-to-mouth grubbing and a victor who has circumvented conventionality and apparent destiny to become a psychical congregate of paradoxical array. More than just being entertained, I learned from this book and felt immersed in it singular culture, as though I had spent years exploring his world. It has the distinguishing earmarks of a masterpiece – vibrant plot, memorable characters, bucolic setting, with the personal touch of the sensitive diarist. He is an intuitive and imaginative author par excellence.

I give this new work by Mr. Robbins my highest recommendation, both as a licensed therapist and voracious reader. I look forward to seeing future offerings by this exciting new author. Thank you for the opportunity to discuss its merits.

Sincerely, 






Sara L. Griffith, LMFT
Eagle River, Alaska
May 1, 2007

This is my closest friend that I had for 17 years, Lindy Yeager, my next door neighbor, West Pointer and SAC Bomber pilot and avid reader. This is Lindy when he was getting married. His wife committed suicide and eventually Lindy committed suicide, too. Lindy is "BLACK HOLE" in my first novel, THESE PRECIOUS DAYS.

by
E. Lowell  " NO SWEAT" / "Robbie"  Robbins, Jr. 

     Back in the 70's when I was writing for THE IRVINE TIMES-HERALD in Irvine, Kentucky, I heard about a man that lived out in the country that had a little grocery store on the Winchester Road. His name was Shirley King and he had been on the PT boat with John Kennedy during World War Two. 
      Having grown up in the 50's and 60's it was impossible not to know who John Kennedy was. And my grandfather, DaddyMack, was the owner of our town's one picture show.  I had seen PT 109 three times and doing something like that almost made me an expert on the Kennedys. 
     I grabbed my camera and some film that our poor newspaper afforded and jumped into my van and headed down through Main Street out past my high school and out along a curvy road leading off into into a late summer of goldenrod and goldfinches. The sun-and-shadows messed with my soul as I passed through the countryside until I came to a stretch where I spotted a grey, wooden building owning corrugated sheets of rust around its base, faded signs on its side and out front,  "KING'S GROCERY."   Entering, I found myself in the den of dim-lit wooden shelves loaded down in canned goods and on the floor stacked against the counters, burlap commodities that my beloved Estill County occasionally bought. Occasionally, as there were those nefarious mid-nights when begotten outposts such as this were delicious palaces to rob.  
     Back off in the store, in a corner behind the counters, a man in coveralls and a worn farmer's cap was messing around, acting like he was paying me little notice.  A minute passed and then the man spoke, asking if I needed anything. I told him that I was a writer and that I wanted to do a story on Shirley King and what he had done with John Kennedy.
     The man said that he was Shirley King and then grabbed a chunk of quiet. You could see I had hit on something that took a hold on him. His stare went straight out the door to a world of long ago.
     Shirley walked back from behind the counter. Though he was dressed like some farmer just in from fixing fences, I sensed that there was more to him that a barn full of tobacco or a cow that lost her calf. I saw William Holden. Having grown up in a small apartment over the top DaddyMack's theater, I identified people by the way movie stars looked and acted. For me, Shirley King was a lonely William Holden.  
     "Kennedy was younger than any of us. We called him Uncle Jack. He might have went 120 pounds. We weren't on the 109. Ours was 59."
     "59?"
     "Yeah, it came after the 109. We called her 49. Joked it would be 1949 before the war was over. PT stood for patrol torpedo. Motor patrol torpedo boats. They were suppose to get in close to torpedo ships. But it didn't take long before the Navy found out that PT boats were useless. They'd get blown up before they could do anything. Our boat was one of the few that ever torpedoed a ship. Unfortunately, ours. The Capella. It was an accident on a training run off Narragansett Bay."
      "What was Kennedy like?"   
      "I liked him. Allowed he loved to hear me talk.  Late in '43 we had our torpedo tubes removed and mounted machine guns in their place. The boys liked me because I was from Kentucky and kept a still on the boat. The Navy had this stuff called Pink Lady that was used to propel torpedoes. They put that pink stuff in it to keep us from drinking it. After '43 we never had any torpedoes. Kennedy knew that. But Uncle Jack kept right on requisitioning.. I'd run it through my still and what came out would make you slap your grandma. Made a smooth drink mixed with pineapple juice. Some liked it with coconut but I preferred it like Uncle Jack did --- straight. After we'd lower the flag in the eve it was Pink Lady time."   
     "Did he ever talk about the 109?"      
     "Said if he hadn't swam in college he'd-a never been able to save one guy. Some of our crew had been with him on 109. Kennedy's back hurt all the time. Allowed he'd had trouble with it before 109. After what happened never helped any. We'd go up in and around these little islands and he'd never let us go any place where we couldn't fast turn around. I guess 109 made him like that."
      "What did you ever do on 59?"
      "We saved forty marines one night. You should have seen them. Their boat had sunk just off shore. God knows what would have happened if we hadn't come along. The island was loaded with Japs. I pulled one in and he kissed me. Got 'em all on our boat and after we got 'em out of trouble we ran out of gas. Luckily, another PT Boat threw us a line and towed us back to Lambu Lambu. One of 'em died in Kennedy's bunk."
      "I heard you saw Kennedy in Kentucky?"
      "Yeah, during the presidential campaign. Kennedy came through Louisville. Spotted my sign: 'HELLO  49ER!'   He had the motorcade stop. Sent two secret service men over to fetch me. When I came up to him he grinned and asked if I had any Pink Lady.  I told him I might if I looked right hard. He bust out laughing and got me to ride with him."
       "Did you have it?"
       "I'll never tell."
        And Shirley King never did. 

This past summer I had dinner with John Lovett ( the movie star; 3 Amigos, etc) at The Lexington Green in Lexington, Ky.  This is a photo that Chesteen took of us as I was conversing with him about my 2 novels which he now has, etc. John referred me to Jerry Bruckheimer which never got my novels--but his wife did.