Musings of a Private Man

About the Book

The most important thing I learned about Bill was his experience with Carl Sagan’s book Contact. There is a story in this collection that Bill wrote called Contact. It’s not a finished piece, nor is it a very cohesive piece, but the experience he is trying to capture is one of the most fascinating and extraordinary events I have ever heard of, and it’s something I will never forget. As you’ll read, when Bill was about 30 years old, he was on a flight home from California, and he had the book Contact that he began reading on that flight. Early in the book a few things jump out to Bill. First, the location of the novel begins in a Wisconsin town near a lake, just like how Bill had grown up near Lake Michigan. Then we find out the main character has lost her father while she’s in grade school, in a sudden way, just as Bill had. But to confirm that this book, which Carl Sagan wrote in 1985, was indeed connected to Bill, was the passage that read his exact name. The sentence is: Billy Horstman, who sat next to her, gently reached out and placed his hand over hers. This book was created by Sally Riessen Hunt (Horstman), Brooke Laufer and Barbara Monier, who together lovingly gathered and organized Bill’s writings with the shared conviction that he was a wondrous man.

About the Author