Chance. Beginnings by Roberts Essex is an expansive autobiographical narrative that traces the formative decades of Chance Brogdon, the author’s literary counterpart, from a precarious birth in rural Georgia through childhood, adulthood, public service, marriage, fatherhood, and profound personal loss. The book identifies Essex as a pseudonym for the man presented as Chance, giving the narrative the character of memoir even as it frequently adopts the distance of third-person storytelling. Its title gains significance almost immediately after the difficult circumstances surrounding Chance’s birth, when his mother resolves that her premature and injured son will survive: “And she named him Chance.” From there, chance and providence become competing explanations for nearly everything that happens to him. Family, Southern culture, work, temptation, suffering, and Christian faith form the book’s central subjects, while Savannah and southeast Georgia provide a setting that becomes nearly as important as the people themselves.

Essex is especially attentive to the physical texture of memory. Neighborhood streets, country roads, restaurants, radios, records, cars, grocery stores, storms, family meals, police uniforms, and even particular smells are preserved with remarkable specificity. That attention turns Avondale and the surrounding Savannah area into a detailed record of a particular place and generation. Chance’s mother, Anne, emerges as the emotional and spiritual center of those memories, serving as provider, confidante, teacher, and the person who first gives him the Christian faith that later becomes his primary way of interpreting suffering. His father, Bernie, is drawn more turbulently, capable of humor, ingenuity, affection, volatility, and frightening behavior. The prose itself has the rhythm of oral storytelling. Essex regularly interrupts himself, addresses the reader, digresses into local history, and returns to stories after long detours. This abundance gives the book intimacy and personality, although its preference for accumulation over compression sometimes slows the narrative. Lists, historical explanations, repeated observations, and extended anecdotes make the book feel like an archive of remembered life as much as a conventional chronological memoir.

As Chance enters adulthood, the book becomes more confessional and considerably more intense. His work in emergency medicine and law enforcement exposes him to fatal accidents, violent confrontations, drug investigations, domestic crises, practical jokes, institutional culture, and the constant possibility of sudden death. The police chapters in particular combine professional pride with stories of foolishness, danger, friendship, and grief, including the deaths of fellow officers and Chance’s own encounters with armed suspects. Essex applies similar candor to Chance’s private life, describing troubled marriages, sexual behavior, pornography, infidelity and temptation, fatherhood, and repeated efforts at repentance. These subjects are viewed consistently through Chance’s Christian convictions, so moral failure and spiritual renewal become a repeating pattern. The discussions of race, desegregation, crime, policing, and social change are also strongly filtered through Chance’s personal memories and judgments. That subjectivity is central to the book’s identity. The reader encounters twentieth-century Savannah as Chance remembers, interprets, and argues with it, with all the affection, anger, nostalgia, certainty, and contradiction contained in that perspective.

The closing chapters give the preceding hundreds of pages a sharper emotional purpose. Chance’s long desire to become a father is fulfilled with the birth of Dillon, and his devotion to his son soon becomes the most consequential relationship in the narrative. When allegations of abuse lead to Chance’s dismissal from the police department, the subsequent investigation clears those allegations, but the damage to his career and marriage has already been severe. The book then ends with Eve disappearing with three-year-old Dillon in defiance of the custody proceedings, leaving Chance searching for his son and attempting to reconstruct both his life and his faith. At that point, one of the simplest sentences in the book carries much of its central idea: “But Chance refused to give up.” Because Beginnings is presented as the first part of a larger life story, its unresolved conclusion feels deliberate. Taken as a whole, the book is a candid, highly detailed Southern life narrative shaped by family memory, first-responder experience, personal failure, resilience, and an enduring conviction that faith can give meaning to events that otherwise appear governed only by chance.

Pages: 409 | ASIN : B0F7XYQ66P