Novelist Online Onpaper

HELL AT THE BREECH by Tom Franklin, a review

2012-02-19T12:22:00.000-08:00

HELL AT THE BREECH is a story of greed and violence in a section of turn-of-the-century Alabama, which is reminiscent of the wild west. The writing carried me along; whenever the author focused on the protagonist, Sheriff Waite, the book came alive. There is an element of the mystical in one character, a midwife, who has second sight. There are the innocents who do casually evil things. There is a string of false assumptions that carry the characters into deadly actions in the novel as in real life. Justice comes in the form of a crazed mob killing innocents as well as the guilty and from the sheriff who is capable of relentless brutality. It was a well-written, at times powerful book, but one reading of this author is enough.

Notes on MYSTIC RIVER by Dennis Lehane

2012-02-04T12:44:00.000-08:00

My notes from March 15, 2004: MYSTIC RIVER by Dennis Lehane. After seeing the film, I read the book—and couldn’t put it down. I tried reading a Lehane detective novel before picking up Mystic River and I thought it was awful. This was an instance of the film improving the book since I could see each character from the movie as I read. This was a well-written novel of family, betrayal, planned violence, misassumptions (life is so filled with them), random violence, and the vagaries of life.

Pretty Good for Free

2012-01-17T08:36:00.000-08:00

THE JYNX has finally been lifted from the depths of Barnes and Noble by an anonymous reviewer who gave it four stars on Jan. 15, 2012. The only previous rater, also anonymous, had given it two stars without an explanation. The four star reviewer posted a very brief review under the headline: “Pretty Good for Free.”
The review: “I have paid for books that were not nearly as well done.” I assume this positive rating and review could result in higher downloads for THE JYNX on Barnes and Noble. I hope so.

Notes on DISGRACE by J. M. Coetzee

2012-01-15T12:58:00.000-08:00

J. M. Coetzee is the South African writer who won the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature,
DISGRACE is a piece of literary writing without pretensions of being literary. Coetzee is so commanding a writer that it just is literary. The story flows easily, the writing is relatively simple and very engaging. I was drawn into the world of the protagonist David Lurie, a 52-year-old twice-divorced, college professor in Cape Town, South Africa.
Sex is the center of his life; with prostitutes, with students, with hungry women. An affair he pressed on a 19 or 20 year student plunges him into disgrace in the minds of everyone but himself. He is so extraordinarily self-centered and arrogant he isn’t aware of the impropriety of what he did with the student.
His arrogance prevents him humbling himself to save his job and his pension. He didn’t like his job anyhow. He had no respect for his students, and a strong distaste for his teaching. His dream is to write an opera about Bryon and one of his many mistresses, Teresa, a young Italian woman, only 19, recently married, whom Byron has dumped. Teresa, however, longs for Byron for the remainder of her life. Their affair was a transforming experience for her.
In the aftermath of being forced from his teaching post, Lurie goes into the backcountry of South Africa, where his daughter, Lucy, a lesbian whose lover has abandoned her, is running a small farm with the help of Petrus, a hired black African. Lucy doesn’t respect her father, who like so many, if not almost all, parents still wants to run his daughter’s life, assuming that he knows what is best for her no matter how much she resists.
On a day the black African, Petrus, isn’t around, two black men and a youth appear at Lucy’s farm. Lurie, who is suspicious of the three from the outset, is shoved into a bathroom and locked in with little resistance on his part. Dealing with predators, Lurie acts as though talking to them will make them go away. His daughter is raped and impregnated; the three pour mineral oil on Lurie and set him afire, laughing at him. They steal his car and whatever they find valuable at the farm.
Lurie’s burns are painful and embarrassing, but not devastatingly serious. He comes across as a wimp at best and a coward at worst, a man so civilized that he has lost the capability of fighting in the face of superior odds no matter what the outcome. Later in the book, he comes across the youth involved in the attack on Lucy and bats him around—an easier task than fighting two strong, determined, violent men.
It turns out that the boy is a relative of Petrus’ and Petrus has designs on Lucy’s farm. Petrus owns the land next door. Petrus is used to illustrate the shift in power in South Africa in that he decides he will no longer farm for Lucy and that if she wants to fall under his protection she has to become his third wife or concubine—not that he really wants her sexually, but because he wants to own the land and dominate his little world.
Lucy is willing to go along with that arrangement if Petrus will guarantee she can keep her house. She is just as empty as her father, but in a different way.
The two grown predators were more interested in demeaning the once dominate whites, Lurie and Lucy, than in robbing them. They use rape to illustrate the shift in power in post-apartheid South Africa. Perhaps there is play on the issue of rape domination since Lurie used his dominant role as a professor to impose himself sexually on a young woman, which is a subtle form of rape/domination. The earthy Africans used the old fashioned approach to physically forcing themselves on the white woman, Lucy, in their exercise of domination/rape.
There is an interesting subplot of the fascination and lure of creativity with Lurie locked into his opera, living in his mind. But the emptiness and self-centeredness and selfishness of the professor is driven home at the end of the book when he allows a crippled stray dog, who has come to love him and depend on him, to be euthanized instead of saving him. Perhaps it also shows how little Lurie values life, his own and other creatures. At no point did the book become a drag. Coetzee, indeed, is a great writer, a great creator of characters, a great grasper of the turmoil in the South African society in which he once lived.

The End of the Trail: 1 or Synchronicity and Syracuse Herald Journal

2012-01-04T18:06:00.000-08:00

On a morning in the mid-December just past, I was putting together the biography a minor character, the editor of the New York Vision, in my latest rewrite of BEN CONNOLLY in the PARIS COMMUNE when I decided to look up Alexander (Casey) Jones, who was the decidedly larger than life editor of the Syracuse Herald Journal when I worked there as a reporter from late 1959 to early 1963.
In the course of my Googling, I found a story by Dick Long, an old friend from Syracuse, written in November, 2010 about the passing of Howard Carroll, another colleague in my Syracuse days.
I decided to contact Dick—and much to my dismay I learned he had died the week before. Looking a little further, the name of another Herald Journal colleague, Jane Vadeboncoeur, was added to my list of the dead along with Bill Stevens.
And then, the synchronicity: later in the afternoon of my Googling, a Christmas card from Jerry Cooley, my favorite editor in my Syracuse days, arrived with a note telling me that Dick Long and Joan Vadeboncoeur had died.
All five are held in treasured corners of my memory:
Casey Jones, who had been the managing editor of the Washington Post before coming to Syracuse, was so commanding a writer and so dominant a figure that everyone in Syracuse, glanced at the front page of the Herald Journal then immediately turned to the editorial page to read his by-lined editorial of the day.
Dick Long taught me my beginning skills as an investigative reporter: how to look up real estate deals, how to shove aside those blocking the way to dig into public records.
Howard Carroll was my model as a journalist. He was crusty, he was a master of reporting, he was generous. The one incident that I have never forgotten was a day on which we all repaired, as we often did, to a local seedy bar for an after deadline drink. Beer was ten cents a glass. The reporters were joking and laughing and talking about the stories just written when a man in a very nice suit sitting along the bar leaned over to say to Howard, “I used to be a newspaperman.”
“What do you do now?” Howard asked.
“Public relations for xxxx Corporation.”
“You were never a newspaperman,” Howard said, each word dripping with contempt, turning his back on the very nice suit.
Not many years later, Howard became director of media relations for the National Education Association, which sounds like a PRman to me. I often wondered if Howard remembered that unforgettable (for me) scene in that seedy bar.
The early 1960s was still an era of black and brown sports jackets and white shirts; in other words clothing was generally dull. Even our ties were dull. One day, Joan Vadeboncoeur, walked into the office in a “shocking pink” suit. That was so startling as fashion moment in that grey city room that over the years I have recalled it in many a conversation.
Bill Stevens was a terrific reporter and writer and all-round nice guy, who in an act of generosity gave me a piece of free lance business writing for an appliance magazine. We weren’t paid much at the Syracuse Herald Journal so the money was very welcome. I would sit down one weekend a month and earn more money from this free lance assignment than I did in a week or two as a newspaper reporter.
Bill, who also worked for the AP and UPI, died in November.

THE DREAM DANCER: “Best Free Nook Book I've read so far!

2011-12-19T08:12:00.000-08:00

Another marvelous review of THE DREAM DANCER on Barnes and Noble:
“Best Free Nook Book I've read so far! This is a terrific book. It starts a little slow, but that is necessary "business" that needs to happen to set up the rest of the story. This many-layered story will keep you up at night wondering about humanity. “

Attention Matt Damon: review of THE HERO

2011-12-03T11:54:00.000-08:00

Two four-star reviews of THE HERO on Kindle:

The Hero is a keeper, September 11, 2011
By ohara:
Most of the self-published books on Kindle that I've bought have been duds, but not The Hero. Interestingly, it begins as a romance, then morphs into a mystery/thriller that I couldn't put down. Retired reporter Ken Crowe has woven together a great story and engaging characters, with just enough color to securely anchor it in time and place. This could easily be the basis for a Matt Damon film.

Don't miss it, November 23, 2011
By M. Simpson "Kindle lover"
I thoroughly enjoyed this mystery. It took a while for the mystery to develop but I didn't mind. The book was good even when it was a romance. It was a truly entertaining story from the beginning to the very end.

THIS IS A REMARKABLE BOOK: THE DREAM DANCER REVIEW

2011-11-23T14:19:00.000-08:00

The Dream Dancer by Kenneth C. Crowe
From Barnes & Noble: Anonymous
Posted November 1, 2011
Word wise

THIS IS A REMARKABLE BOOK. The characters are extremely well written, the plot is uncommon, and the conflicting cultures of the people all interweave to make a truly outstanding piece of literature.
I ALMOST DIDN'T READ THIS BOOK. I was bored with the first few paragraphs, and told myself I should be enjoying reading, not enduring it. I made a deal with myself that I would read the first chapter, and if I still wasn't interested I would allow myself to quit this book. I finished the book in less than 24 hours, and have gone back and reread many of the passages in the next 2 days.
I FOUND MYSELF ENGROSSED IN THE PEOPLE AND THE DIFFICULTIES THEY FACED. I’ve read other books which tell a story of white versus red races. Other writers also depict the unjust ways the whites meet out “justice." The joy with this writer is how the book explains some of the cultural differences between races, and the strength of one man standing up for his people and their beliefs.
I now have 2 more books by this author in my shelves, awaiting the chance to read them. I also expect I'll be rereading this book.

COLOR OF the SEA by John Hamamura

2011-11-04T10:14:00.000-07:00

The protagonist, Sam Hamada, takes us into Japanese-American and Japanese cultures. He sees the world through those two very different cultural filters
The author gives us the underlying cause of the Japanese attack on the U.S.—that the Roosevelt Administration had cut off the supply of oil to Japan. He describes the humbling of the Japanese as employees of white Americans in Hawaii, the prejudice against Japanese immigrants in California, and the humiliation of the Japanese in their defeat by American arms on Okinawa.
I was a boy in grade school during World War II; I remember after the attack on Pearl Harbor smashing a few Japanese-made objects against a wall in Woodside, Queens. We were inspired by the propaganda machine of the time to hate the Japanese. The first time I ever heard anything good said about the Japanese came from my brother Bill, who had been wounded twice as a Marine infantryman during the Battle for Okinawa. I was shocked when he said, shortly after returning home, that Japanese were good soldiers, but poorly led and so inadequately equipped that he wondered at the stupidity of going to war in such circumstances.

THE MAN WHO KILLED THE DEER by Frank Waters (1942)

2011-10-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

The power of this novel lies in the information it delivers about the Pueblo culture, while at the same time telling a fascinating story. The protagonist is Martiniano, a Pueblo Indian who has just returned from years of education in white boarding schools. He is a man caught between the white and the Pueblo cultures. Through the course of the novel, Martiniano, who is a decent human being, moves closer to his lost Indian culture and by the end is back to the blanket as a white trader, Byers says. Byers is a white man with an intimate understanding of the Pueblos and an extraordinary closeness to them—and yet he really doesn’t fully understand them.
The Deer is at the core of the Pueblo spiritual life which centers on the belief that all of nature is interconnected that this life is very much controlled by the other world.
There is a perfect balance in the telling of the story, which opens with Palemon, a traditional Pueblo and Martiniano’s close friend, sensing something, he doesn’t know what. He rises from bed and goes up on the mountain, where he finds Martiniano, who has been injured while hunting. Palemon the fetches the deer Martiniano has killed out of season and without the ceremony appropriate under the Pueblo spiritual life. The deer’s spirit will haunt and shape Martiniano through the story. At the end of the book, Martiniano, who has moved closer to his spiritual roots, rises from his bed, haunted by the drums of the kivas, to go up the mountain for an inexplicable reason to rescue Palemon’s injured son, who was completing the rite of passage from boy to man. Ergo the balance of the story and the spiritual/physical life.
At the end, Martiniano decides to submit his own son to the Pueblo system of spiritual education—with the emphasis on the spirit, the unity of the tribe and nature--instead of pursuing the white man’s path of getting and spending.
In reading “The Man Who Killed the Deer”, I began to see why some suspect Carlos Castaneda was writing fiction rather than anthropological studies in his Don Juan books. The roots of the information of Don Juan’s teaching are available in “The Man who killed the deer” including the peyote path.

A Song for Sandy Pope

2011-10-08T09:48:00.000-07:00

Just the other day, singer-songwriter John Paul Wright of Louisville, KY, uploaded his latest song, “Ain’t No Easy Run (Sandy Pope)” onto YouTube. He was on his way home from the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) convention in Cleveland when the sight of tractor trailers barreling along reminded him that Sandy Pope was once a truck driver.
As the title of JP Wright’s song implies he sings about Sandy Pope’s campaign to oust James P. Hoffa from the presidency of the Teamsters.
With the ballots in the mail and supporters making calls from phone banks to turn out her voters, we will find out next month whether Pope can fulfill her goal of getting 150,000 Teamsters to vote for her. As JP Wright sings to the individual Teamsters listening: “One vote for Pope and the election’s won. Hoffa’s days are done.”
If the turnout for this election is similar to the 2006 election, then 150,000 would assure a victory for Pope. What she has going for her is a base of support from TDU, which is worth 90,000 to 100,000 votes, the rest would have to come from new Teamsters who want to create a rank and file activist union, from women attracted to a woman candidate, from those old timers disenchanted by Hoffa’s performance as president over the past 12 years.
Among the disenchanted is Fred Gegare, currently an international vice president and the third candidate for the presidency. Gegare decided to run against Hoffa over what he considered his disastrous handling of union finances, contracts and pensions.
The only hope for a change of direction in the Teamsters is Sandy Pope. She comes from the reform milieu with the promise of instilling activism in the Teamsters both internally and externally as did Ron Carey in the victorious strike against UPS in 1997.

Shingles after three years

2011-09-15T09:41:00.000-07:00

Today marks the third anniversary of the shingles attack on my left eye. Every morning I awaken with itching, aching or an unpleasant sensation around the left eye, usually above it, in the eye brow, on the forehead, in the scalp.
My ophthalmologist told me not to expect a quick cure, then that the aftermath of the shingles (postherpetic neuralgia) would continue for a year or two. I assume now that barring a miraculous cure, I will endure this minor plague for the rest of my life.
The round robin of itching, aching or unpleasant sensations continues through all my waking hours. In addition, I get tired easily in doing my daily exercises or heavy household chores. In fact, I take a daily hour-long nap. When I’ve tried cutting out the nap or trimming it to a half hour, I fall asleep watching TV or reading in the evening. So I’ve come to accept the need for that nap. Besides, I enjoy it.
One side effect of my PHN (postherpetic neuralgia) is that many of my relatives have gotten the vaccine, Zostavax, which cuts the odds of getting shingles by 50 percent. My experience shows that is a chance well worth taking.

Everyone should read this book

2011-09-10T10:36:00.000-07:00

What joy. Someone with the moniker Phyllis L reviewed THE DREAM DANCER on Kindle. It is the first review of what I consider my best novel in the two years that THE DREAM DANCER has been available on Kindle. Ms. L gave it five stars. Others among the 8,000 plus who have downloaded the novel from various sites have indicated they appreciated THE DREAM DANCER. Kindle readers have given it 10 “likes it,” seven readers on Apple have given it an average of 4.5 stars and three on Barnes & Noble also have given it an average of 4.5 stars.
Ms. L’s review of THE DREAM DANCER:
“This story really made me aware of the brutal way my ancestors were treated, I loved the way he told the story, I think everyone should read this book and ask theirselves ...Was this my ancestor that was this cruel? And How can I in this day and age make life better for people worse off then me...There but by the grace of God go I....”

THE MEMORY GENE by Tom Baum

2011-08-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

“The Memory Gene” is a quicksand novel. I considered the opening two chapters so trite that I almost didn’t continue, but I did. And then, I got drawn in and kept going right to the end.
Tom Baum’s “The Memory Gene” is worth reading for the original, impressively imaginative plot.

Bibliotastic review of THE HERO

2011-08-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

An editor at Bibliotastic (www.bibliotastic.com), the London-based publisher and distributor of free ebooks, gave my novel, THE HERO, four stars and a very nice review:
I liked this story. It kept me interested and guessing as to where it would end up. I particularly liked Ryan as the character who is delving into things that bring up a past he would much rather forget. His character is really well written and has his own secrets. I also liked how Nicky's story was interwoven with his. Overall I thought the story was full of intrigue and well worth reading. It had plenty of twists and turns!
In addition, Bibliotastic redid the cover of THE HERO. I like their version much better than my own. Check out the Bibliotastic website to see it.

The seed of The Absconder

2011-08-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

The seed of my latest novel, THE ABSCONDER, was planted during my boyhood in Woodside, Queens when three young fellows went on a robbery spree in 1950 killing a poor soul while trying to steal his car.
Two of the killers, who lived within blocks of me, were executed in Sing Sing within a year. The third member of the trio was saved from the chair, but spent the next 28 years in prison..
THE ABSCONDER is the story of a fictional version of that survivor, who goes on the run rather than being returned to prison by a vengeful parole officer.
If you could ask the classic question of protagonists: What do you want? his
answer would be: “To walk free through fields of wheat, no matter what the cost.”
One of the underlying themes of THE ABSCONDER is fulfillment of the Jesuit premise: “Give me the boy, and I will give you the man.”
THE ABSCONDER is now available on Kindle, Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, and Sony.

SANDY POPE wins the first round of Teamsters 2011 election

2011-07-19T12:37:00.000-07:00

Sandy Pope won the first round of the Teamsters 2011 election—the media battle before and after the convention--walking across James P. Hoffa like he wasn’t there. Fred Gegare, the third candidate wasn’t even in the running.
Media success is crucial to foster name recognition. Hoffa has had his thanks to his dad. No doubt that Sandy Pope’s appeal to journalists is the fact that a woman with a black belt in karate is running for the presidency of a union with a reputation of burly, big-bellied men who drive trucks.
Hoffa, unlike Sandy Pope, has never driven a truck as a real rank and file Teamster. He does have the belly that goes with the old out-of-date image.
Before last month’s Teamsters Convention in Las Vegas, Sandy Pope scored with a major piece about her in The Nation and on public radio stations across the nation via an interview on The Story with Dick Gordon.
During the convention, the New York Times, CNN, and ABC featured her. After the convention, she managed to wind up in a big story in The Sunday Times of London.
The assumption is that the combination of support by a large bloc of Teamsters local leaders and his incumbency makes Hoffa an almost sure bet to win another five years in the presidency.
But there are factors at play that could cause that sure bet to stumble. Sandy Pope is getting the needed name recognition, she has the support of the potent reform group, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, she has a substantial record as a local union leader in New York City as well as a background as a working Teamster and organizer, and in addition, the issue that made her attractive to journalists could very well bring in votes from the women who make up 20 to 25 percent of the union.
And, the decision of Midwestern Teamster leader and International Vice President Fred Gegare to run for the presidency against Hoffa could change the outcome of the 2011 election. There is the possibility Gegare could win and the probability he will take a substantial number of votes away from Hoffa.
In his acceptance speech on July 1 as a presidential candidate at the convention, Gegare contended that Hoffa betrayed the members by allowing United Parcel Service to withdraw its employees from the Central States Pension in 2007 in exchange for making it easier for the IBT to organize the 12,000 workers in UPS-owned Overnite Trucking.
Without UPS, which has created its own plan, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars every year into Central States to fund its workers’ retirement, the storied pension fund is in serious trouble, according to Gegare, who is a fund trustee.
Gegare said that he told Hoffa at the time: “Don’t let it happen. You’re going to destroy everything your father built. You are going to ruin the foundation of this great organization...You ain’t going to see the tsunami coming if you let them take 45,000 participants out of Central
State Pension Fund.” Gegare told the convention, “They gave the farm away to UPS...That’s criminal. I’m telling you,
we cannot afford it. I got four retired for every
one working.”
Gegare sounded a warning to the union as a whole: “
Let me tell you something. If Central States goes down, there’s going to be a domino effect from the New England pension fund, Central PA, Central States, and the Western pension fund, because we all got the same top employers. If they did it to me, I keep telling the members, they’re going to do it to you. You got to get involved.”

THE DREAM DANCER soars as a freebie

2011-07-18T09:06:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, Amazon cut the price of my novel, THE DREAM DANCER, from a modest 99 cents for a Kindle copy to zero, free, nothing. The impact?
On the first day of the giveaway, Saturday, July 16, 2011, there were 553 downloads of THE DREAM DANCER putting the novel at 181 on Kindle’s free-ebooks best seller list; number five in Literary Fiction and number three in the Occult genre.
By the following day (Sunday), there had been 2,022 downloads with THE DREAM DANCER ranked 69 on Kindle’s free-ebooks best seller list; number one in both the Occult and Mythology genres, and number two in Literary Fiction.
For the first half of July while THE DREAM DANCER was still selling for 99 cents, one copy was sold providing me with a royalty of 35 cents. Now I wish the 2000 plus readers who downloaded this now free ebook had been willing to pay the measly penny short of a dollar, but they weren’t.
I must admit I’m happy just to have more readers, especially thousands of more readers.
For those who don’t know what the term downloading means, let me explain: Downloading an ebook is like selecting a hard-copy book from a bookstore or library shelf. You add it to the lists of books on your Kindle, or whatever device you are using, and hopefully read it.
I consider THE DREAM DANCER my best novel. In the two years that it has been available through Amazon, no one has reviewed it. I was happy to see one person clicked “the like it button” over the weekend.
I hope that all the 2,000 plus downloaders (so far) will read THE DREAM DANCER and that some among them will review it. And most of all I hope that thousands more will download and try it.
Oh, the reason for Amazon slashing the price? The company has a policy offering its books for the lowest price out there. THE DREAM DANCER was being distributed by Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Apple, etc. as a freebie. Amazon discovered that and matched it.

Herman Benson, the soul of the Association for Union Democracy

2011-07-09T14:37:00.000-07:00

Herman Benson has spent the past 42 years as the soul of the Association for Union Democracy on a quest as elusive as the Holy Grail: to instill union democracy in the American labor movement. At the age of 96, he says that biology is finally catching up with him. Not that he is going to retire.
Benson recently informed AUD’s board of directors that he is relinquishing his roles as editor of the Union Democracy Review and secretary treasurer. He plans to continue as a member of the board of directors, to write from time to time for the Review, and to be on call via telephone and e-mail for union members who need his help. A lot of them have over the past decades.
Back in the late 1980’s Benson stepped down as AUD’s executive director passing that post to Susan Jennik, a union activist and labor lawyer. Benson and Jennik played central roles in assuring that the rank and file election of the Teamsters hierarchy promised in the federal court decent decree aimed at cleaning the mob and corruption out of the union was run by court-approved officers not the IBT and its locals.
As a result and with the significant help of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Ron Carey became the first rank and file-elected president of International Brotherhood of Teamsters in 1991.
That must have been Benson’s crowning triumph. I’m sure that he enjoys the memories of dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds, of lesser victories.
Benson was in his 70s when he gave up his role as AUD’s executive director. At the time, I was Newsday’s labor writer and intended to do a major piece on his retirement and his dedication to trying to make the American labor movement a linchpin of democracy. Well, I didn’t write it because he didn’t retire. And the same is true now. He isn’t retiring and is continuing to do what he can as a one-man revolution of union democracy despite the claws of biology.

Bibliotastic an inviting new outlet for indie authors

2011-07-03T12:42:00.000-07:00

Every indie author hungers for a review, no less a number of reviews. Bibliotastic.com, the latest indie author outlet on the scene, not only urges its audience to review the ebooks downloaded but also provides a team of in-house reviewers. Potentially, you can get inside and outside reviews.
When the site was officially launched on Feb. 6, 2011, London-based bibliotastic proclaimed that it “aspires to be to the free ebook market what YouTube is to user-generated video.” That is pretty ambitious, but what really caught my eye was the statement by Bernard Gerard, one of the co-founders, said: “What our authors long for more than anything is feedback from the reader.” No kidding. All of us indie authors hunger for just that.
I have added my novel, THE HERO, to bibliotastic.com’s list in the mystery category. I look forward to a review of THE HERO by the bibliotastic.com editors with some excitement and trepidation. Will they get around to reviewing it; will they find it marvelous, mundane or somewhere in between? My personal opinion: I consider THE HERO a really good book, better than most, but nowhere as good as my novel, THE DREAM DANCER, which is the closest I have come to a work of art.
The bibliotastic site lists three regular reviewers; it is worth going to the page to read their brief bios. With just three regulars it could be a while to read your book reviewed, if ever. So indie authors had better hurry to list their books before the queues for reviews go around the block.

Recalling Gen. Jaroslaw Dombrowski

2011-06-07T12:08:00.000-07:00

The 140th anniversary of the suicidal death of Gen. Jaroslaw Dombrowski(aka Dabroski)via a knowingly fruitless charge on rue Myrha during the waning moments of the Paris Commune was two weeks ago on May 23, 2011.
For some unknown reason a Polish-French committee observed that occasion on May 25, 2011 in rue Myrha. I came across a reference to that date while doing some casual browsing in preparation of another rewrite of my novel, BEN CONNOLLY. I originally undertook this novel as a fictionalization of the life of Januarius A. MacGahan. I was in love with that project and spent 10 years of writing and research. The end result crashed on take off and was unreadable. I tried to resurrect MacGahan by changing him from a restricting historical character to the imagined Ben Connolly. That turned out not to be much of a novel either.
The best part of the experience was spending 30 days in Paris in 1984 when the dollar loomed like Mount Everest over the franc. I ate in a lot of good restaurants while roaming the scenes of the Paris Commune of 1871.
Getting back to Dombrowski: he became a red hero, a martyr to the cause, celebrated with a Polish biopic in 1975 directed by Bohdan Poreba, in the Spanish Civil War the Dabroski Battalion bore his name, at least one Polish school in Warsaw is named after him, and there are statues of him in the Ukraine.
Although he was a Russian officer, he joined the Polish uprising against the Czar in 1862 and wound up being sentenced to Siberia. He escaped, joined the Parisians—called the Communards--revolting against the French government, and eventually became the commanding general of the Communard forces. He was 34 when he accepted his fate and the hopelessness of escaping from Paris in his charge against the federal force on rue Myrha.
I have two Nineteenth Century biographies of Dombrowski, one in French, the other in German. Back in the 1980s, I flashed through the German version picking out bits of information at the New York Public Library. Recently through the joys of Google I found bookstores with scanned copies of the originals. I purchased both I don’t know if I will ever get around to the painful task of translating them. My German is limited and my French is worse.

Fred Gegare’s June Surprise

2011-06-05T09:54:00.000-07:00

With the Teamsters 2011 convention a little more than three weeks away, Fred Gegare has come up with a June Surprise: Aaron Belk, the late Ron Carey’s executive assistant, has been added to his Fighting for the Members Slate as a candidate for Southern Region vice president.
Aside from rising from a loading dock in Memphis to the top of the Teamsters’ hierarchy by being elected an international vice president on Carey’s reform slate in 1991, Belk distinguished himself in trying—though unsuccessfully—to block the political contributions in 1996 that resulted in Carey’s downfall. At a 1998 Congressional hearing, Belk testified: “I can hold my head high and I can look at myself in the mirror each morning knowing that I did my job to the best of my ability by turning down these large contribution requests and by refusing to support and condone the actions of the 1996 Carey campaign staff and their consultants.”
At the end of this month, we’ll find out whether Gegare, currently an international vice president, will make the 2011 Teamsters election a three-way race by overcoming the barrier facing all outside candidates of being nominated for president by winning the votes of five percent of the 1,700 or so delegates to the Teamsters convention in Las Vegas.
James P. Hoffa, the incumbent international president, and New York Teamsters Local 805 president Sandy Pope are expected to be the other two candidates in the fall election. Hoffa, barring the unforeseen, certainly will be nominated. Pope has the backing of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the nationwide reform group, whose support was crucial to Carey two elections in 1991 and 1996 to the presidency of the Teamsters. Last month, Pope announced she had enough delegates pledged to be nominated.
Pope is running alone—without a slate—hoping to win the votes of the rank and file by contrasting her history as Teamster over the past 33 years—working as a selector, a truck driver, a local union organizer, an international staffer, and finally elected president of a local—against Hoffa’s scant background with summer jobs as a Teamster while in college and later as a lawyer. He was elected international president in 1998 primarily because he was the son of the legendary Jimmy Hoffa. Gegare—who has 39 years of experience at every level of the Teamsters—split with Hoffa last year proclaiming his leadership was disastrous.

My Boyhood Hero William J. Crowe

2011-05-06T17:07:00.000-07:00

My boyhood hero, my brother Bill, died yesterday at the age of 84. So many of my memories of him are when we were young. One of my favorites was a trip to Rockaway Beach back in late July or ear1y August of 1945. Billy had just turned 19, I was 11, and this angry woman came up to us and said to him, “Why aren’t you in the service?” People were like that back in WW II. Billy said, “Because my father has pull.” And we left her fuming. In fact, Billy had just gotten out of a military hospital after recovering from the second wound he suffered as a Marine in the Battle of Okinawa.
He met his wife, Lee, who was a WAVE, when he was stationed in Washington, D.C., before mustering out of the service. Whenever he arrived at his favorite bar in D.C., the piano player would sing Harrigan (H-A-double R-I-G-A-N spells Harrigan). He and Lee got married and moved to Youngstown, Ohio, her home town, where he went to Youngstown University on the GI Bill, then worked in the steel industry and had three kids. When Lee died a few years ago, her best friend asked me where she and Billy had met. I told her in Washington after he came back from Okinawa. The friend hadn’t known that Billy was not only a Marine, but an infantryman who had seen some dreadful action.
Billy loved the ocean and came home to New York every summer to go to the beach and to go swimming in the Atlantic. I can still see him hanging out with his friends before the war in front of Marco’s Candy Store on 47th Street in Woodside; and taking me to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on a bitter cold, windy day and asking what do you want to eat: chow mein or Pizza? I would say both. He ran in the Penn Relays for St. Ann’s High School in Manhattan. He loved boxing. Our father had been a boxer in his youth. Billy took me to many a boxing match at places now long gone: the outdoor arena at Queens Plaza in Long Island City and Sunnyside Gardens on Queens Boulevard in Sunnyside.
No matter how old a brother is, no matter how fulsome a life he had led, it is heartbreaking to lose him.

THE LAKE OF DREAMS, a lockpickers novel

2011-04-18T13:52:00.000-07:00

THE LAKE OF DREAMS
by Kim Edwards

This is a literary work, meaning that like most literary novels it moves slowly. The protagonist, Lucy Jarrett, is a modern woman, who travels the world working in exotic places, moving from affair to affair until she finds a Japanese man to love.
Lucy’s DNA provides her the mystical skill of picking locks, which she applies to ordinary locks and to an almost heroic task in uncovering the buried, tragic story of a pioneering feminist among her antecedents.
In the course of achieving her goal, Lucy manages to put the death of her father in a context which releases her from a lifetime of guilt and provides a previously unknown 90-something cousin with a mollifying solution for her abandonment as a child and adult.
The novel is worth reading for both the unfolding detective-like skills of the protagonist; the vivid picture of the transformation of a town’s economy from a production to a cutesy, tourist milieu; and for the comparison of society’s restrictions on an independent woman in the early 1900s versus the unfettered life that an educated and self-confident Lucy pursues in modern times.

The Arabs and The Aeneid

2011-03-25T11:08:00.000-07:00

As I was in the process of editing my latest novel, THE ABSCONDER, I came across a scene in which the protagonist, Chris, who has memorized THE AENEID in Latin and in English says, “I won’t bore you with the Latin. But I can offer you what Aeneas said to his companions when Troy was burning around them and the Greeks were overwhelming them: Come, let us die/We’ll make a rush into the thick of it./The conquered have one safety: hope for none.”
Those lines immediately gave me a better understanding of the passionate courage of the Arab populace across the Middle East rebelling against the dictators that have deprived of the basic freedoms every human being should enjoy. To make the quote fit the Arab uprisings all that is required is to substitute the word oppressed for conquered. The result would be: Come, let us die/We’ll make a rush into the thick of it./The OPPRESSED have one safety: hope for none.”

Gegare on how Hoffa lost millions

2011-03-16T09:12:00.000-07:00

Fred Gegare today (March 16, 2011) on his website revealed at least one of his serious disenchantments with Teamsters President James P. Hoffa contending that a panicked Hoffa dumped millions of dollars in stock held by IBT entities at rock-bottom prices during the financial crisis of 2009.
“Nearly $30 million dollars of Teamster dues money and charitable contributions were lost when Hoffa's weak knees got the best of him. Countless millions more have been lost because the IBT no longer owns the stock and can't benefit from the market's rebound,” Gegare said.
Gegare has an inside knowledge of the Hoffa Administration since he is an International Vice President who was elected on Hoffa’s 2006 slate. He shocked the Teamsters world when he announced last year that he was running for Teamsters International president against Hoffa.
At the time, Gegare claimed that the union faced a dire future under Hoffa’s disastrous leadership. That generality finally has been brought somewhat into focus by Gegare proclaiming today on his website that Hoffa ignored the advice of financial professionals and bypassed the Teamsters General Executive Board to sell the stock. He said, “By running scared, Hoffa incurred staggering losses that have crippled some of the IBT's most important funds. The Strike and Defense Fund plunged nearly $15 million. The Scholarship Fund saw $3.4 million vanish. The General Fund experienced a $10.2 million decline.”
If Gegare has many more weapons of character destruction to use against Hoffa such as this rush to sell the stocks that portrays him as somewhat clueless then the Teamsters 2011 election will prove to be exciting indeed. In addition the question of the silliness of the rank and file voting to elect James P. Hoffa as a strong leader, because his father Jimmy Hoffa was, will be resurrected.
Gegare is heading the Fighting for the Members slate in his campaign against Hoffa.
Sandy Pope, president of New York Teamsters Local 805, also is running for the Teamsters International Presidency with the backing of Teamsters for a Democratic Union.

IBT Election Supervisor to Hoffa: tsk, tsk

2011-03-15T19:23:00.000-07:00

Richard W. Mark, the official overseeing the Teamsters 2011 International union election, issued his decision today (March 15, 2011) on the Hoffa campaign’s attempt to use the IBT’s treasury (in the form of jobs and benefits) to buy off the opposition led by Fred Gegare. The penalty imposed amounts to tsk, tsk.
Tsk, tsk has a variety of meanings: You should be ashamed of yourself or perhaps, I disapprove of what you are doing or have done.
In sum, Teamsters International President James P. Hoffa (son of Jimmy Hoffa) and some of his cohorts were found by Mark to have offered jobs and at least one extra pension to three Teamsters officials, IBT Car Haul Director Fred Zuckerman and International Trustees Henry Perry and Frank Gallegos, in exchange for their support or for not running in the 2011 Teamsters International Election.
Kenneth Conboy, the Teamsters Election Appeals Master, ordered Mark to come up with a punishment short of denying Hoffa the privilege of running for reelection. Why? The crucial element: the three refused the offers.
Back in 1997, Conboy was the official who barred Ron Carey from running for reelection in 1996 for his supposed involvement in a scheme to misuse the Teamsters’ treasury in his election campaign. Five years later—and somewhat too late—a federal jury found that Carey was telling the truth when he swore to federal agents and a Grand Jury that he knew nothing about the dirty deal. A tsk, tsk wasn’t imposed on Carey, but as part of his pre-trial punishment he was not only barred from running for reelection, but was expelled from Teamsters membership.
Mark’s remedy for the failed dirty deal: “The Hoffa campaign and each candidate on the Hoffa-Hall slate are ordered to cease and desist from using union resources to conduct campaign activity.”
In addition, Mark ordered the posting of a notice to Teamsters members across North America saying: “The Election Supervisor found that before and during May 2010, IBT officials associated with the General President Hoffa’s campaign offered IBT jobs, including salary and benefits, to three individuals in exchange for a promise to support the Hoffa campaign in various ways.”
While the Hoffa folks might be embarrassed by having to face the members who actually read the notice, the sentence imposed by Mark falls far short of Gegare’s demand that Hoffa be disqualified as a candidate.

An interview with the author of THE TRUCKERS

2011-03-15T11:50:00.000-07:00

An interview with Kenneth C. Crowe, author of THE TRUCKERS, by the $100 Plus News of the Association for Union Democracy (www.uniondemocracy.org)
The interview appeared in $100 Plus News on Jan. 6, 2011:

$100 Plus News: What made you write the story now? Were you working on it for some time?
Ken Crowe: The original version of THE TRUCKERS was completed ten years ago in July, 2000. My agent figured there was no market for a labor novel. So, I put the book away with other novels I had written, seemingly doomed to gather dust in a closet. Along came the e-book and online publishing revolution in 2008 led by Amazon’s CreateSpace and Smashwords. I took the novels out of the closet and began rewriting them and putting them on the internet as e-books and
paperbacks. Last summer, I reached THE TRUCKERS. I rewrote the ending to accord with the emergence of Sandy Pope as the TDU-backed, rank and file candidate for IBT president.

$100 Plus News: There is a tension between Helmut Knall and Tommy Kerrigan about whether the International Pres. should get involved in local elections, with Kerrigan believing it was inappropriate despite Knall’s attempts to persuade him that he must support local reformers against the “old guard” which still ran the majority of the locals. Do you believe that dynamic was present
in the Carey administration? Is that meant to be a lesson for reformers?
Ken Crowe: Ken Paff has always believed in reforming the Teamsters from the bottom up. When Ron Carey was elected the IBT’s general president he thought that Teamsters at the local level shared his vision of unselfish, committed leadership, that the good guys would follow his example and the membership would oust those who didn’t. Ken Paff was right in that winning the top
is not enough.

$100 Plus News: Was there any merit to Kerrigan’s position to stay out of local politics?
Ken Crowe: No. That is like the President of the United States staying out of Congressional and Senate elections. A sympathetic base (local union officials in the case of The Truckers or the Teamsters) makes governing so much easier and leading so much more pleasant.

$100 Plus News: After the novel ended we are left with the irony that despite Kerrigan’s successful efforts to win the battles against the companies for the rank and file, it was union enemies from within that were his undoing. In that regard it’s a sad story, though Kerrigan comes across as a hero who gave his life for the working person. Any thoughts?
Ken Crowe: The sophisticated, vicious, unrelenting campaign to destroy Truckers Union president Tommy Kerrigan had its parallel in the Hoffa campaign operatives’ continuous onslaught to undermine Ron Carey from the moment he was elected. Just as in my novel, THE TRUCKERS, the Teamsters old guarders were aroused by self-interest and some rather sordid consultants to turn
out their supporters in their locals or risk losing their comfortable life styles to an awakened rank and file. Myths are built on the bodies of the assassinated, the murdered, and the martyred.

A review of THE TRUCKERS by Kenneth C. Crowe

2011-03-15T11:29:00.000-07:00

The following review of THE TRUCKERS appeared in the Association for Union Democracy’s Jan. 4, 2011 edition of $100 Plus News. It is reprinted with AUD’s permission:

THE TRUCKERS by Kenneth C. Crowe
(CreateSpace, Charleston, SC: 2010) 300pgs.
Available in paperback on Amazon.com for $9.99 and
as an e-book on Kindle and Smashwords.com

AUD REVIEW:

This is an entertaining and fictional account of
the administration of a reformist IBT international
President called Tommy Kerrigan. The
novel is very loosely based on the Carey presidency
of the 1990s. But it is clearly fiction, and
Mr. Kerrigan’s fate turns out to be very different
than Mr. Carey’s. Mr. Crowe dedicates the
novel to Ken Paff, then, and still, director of the
Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) --
who in the novel is the fictional character
“Helmut Knall.”
A very palpable tension between Kerrigan and
Helmut Knall’s “TFOCC” (“Truckers Fighting
Organized Crime and Corruption”) is present
throughout the story. The reader is introduced
to it on page 11, when Kerrigan is planning his
post-election victory party and is consulting
with his top aide “Cobb Wowka” on who
should be on the invitation list. Wowka advises
Kerrigan not to invite Knall, but Kerrigan
reminds Wowka that “TFOCC did a lot for us.”
Wowka replies “Not for us. For their agenda.
Never forget that... Now that you’ve won,
Helmut and crew might get a little hungry for a
piece of action, which is okay, but we want to
keep them at a certain distance. Don’t let them
get the notion they’re gonna run this union
instead of you.” Kerrigan responds accordingly:
“I’ll give ‘em a couple of jobs. I’m sure we
can find an opening for Helmut in Alaska or
Hawaii.” “Right on buddy,” replies Wowka.
Helmut Knall is a smart, no-nonsense, pain-inthe-
neck whose advice to Kerrigan seems
always to be ahead of the game and works each
time Kerrigan does follow it. But Knall’s first
piece of advice, Kerrigan does not follow. The
uninvited Knall interrupts the victory party and
demands to speak to Kerrigan -- Kerrigan
reluctantly gives him a few minutes -- and
Knall points out that though Kerrigan has won
a great victory he needs to remember that most
of the locals are still being run by the “old
guard” -- the officials who owe their allegiance
to “Steamer Staski” and his successors. The
Steamer Staski character is loosely based on
the administration of Jimmy Hoffa, Sr. On his
victory party night, Knall implores Kerrigan to
help Trucker reformers get elected in the locals:
“The union is the locals, the locals are the
union. You should know.” But Kerrigan is
never willing to do this, as he tells Knall time
and time again throughout the book that an
“International President should not get
involved in the politics of the local.”
Meanwhile, the “old guard” infiltrate the
Kerrigan administration, and become his most
trusted aides, only to betray him, and eventually
succeed in their goal to get rid of him.
Sabotage by the old guard starts with its defiance
of Kerrigan’s call to go on a strike, then
moves on to a series of “dirty tricks” and smear
campaigns having to do with Kerrigan’s personal
relationships and alleged ties to organized
crime. Using its influence with an all too
compliant press, and even the FBI and Justice
Department, the old guard overwhelms
Kerrigan with government investigations into
alleged links to organized crime, or “communists.”
Knall advises Kerrigan on union strategy -- it
was the TFOCC’s plan to strike a major carrier,
a strike which turned out to be a a smashing success,
and makes Kerrigan a hero within the union. Later,
Knall and the TFOCC bail out Kerrigan
in another strike when the old guard begins to sabotage
it. But as the dirty tricks by the old guard become more
and more outrageous, and the investigations proceed,
mob characters appear – and are ready to go after
Kerrigan, reacting to schemes orchestrated by
Kerrigan’s union foes.
In the end, Kerrigan makes great gains for the Trucker
rank and file in its battles with employers, but, sadly,
is unable to withstand the relentless assault by his
internal union enemies.

CRYSTALENS AFTERMATH

2011-03-14T11:10:00.000-07:00

My wife, Rae, had Crystalens installed in both eyes after cataract surgery in November and December. Afterwards her left eye began bothering her variously with the sensation of something in the eye, itching, pain, and dry eye. Sometimes these are very intense afflictions.
In January, our ophthalmologist found nothing wrong and suggested an over-the-counter eye drops. Sometimes the eye drops help, sometimes, the drops seem to increase the uncomfortable sensations.
Searching the web for Crystalens aftermath and problems, one mostly gets ads on how wonderful Crystalens are and from surgeons who want to install them. There are scattered accounts by individuals looking for help about having dry eyes or the sensation of something in the eye—and their doctors have suggested eye drops, which don’t cure the problems. As one interlocutor wrote of his problems: “Obviously, nothing helps.”
Hopefully something does help. If you have had problems such as Rae’s in the aftermath of Crystalens implants, please let us know via comments or my e-mail, kencrowe@optonline.net. We are interested in both the extent of the population of these problems and well as a cure.

A TALE OF TWO TEAMSTERS PRESIDENTS

2011-02-27T11:08:00.000-08:00

Two Teamsters presidents, the late Ron Carey and James P. Hoffa, have both been accused of using the union’s dues money to enhance their chances for reelection.
Each contended they were innocent. The difference in their cases is that after an extraordinary investigation that lasted five years, Carey was cleared by a federal jury of charges that he lied in denying he knew about the scheme to swap $885,000 of Teamsters dues money in exchange for contributions to his reelection campaign. Hoffa has yet to be exonerated.
Through the years, Carey’s cries of innocence went unheard as he was barred from running for reelection and then summarily dismissed from Teamsters membership by the union’s Independent Review Board.
Anyone who attended Carey’s trial in the fall of 2001 would say he was proven innocent rather than found not guilty. His defense team including the late Mark Hulkower, Reid Weingarten, Bruce Bishop and Bob Hauptman absolutely destroyed the government’s case in the process of proving it was based on the lies of a witness providing false testimony to avoid a prison sentence.
Now Hoffa is facing the prospect of experiencing what the late Teamsters President Jackie Presser called the hot seat of the union’s presidency.
Hoffa and members of his current slate are accused of offering lucrative jobs and at least one extra pension to three Teamsters officials, IBT Car Haul Director Fred Zuckerman and International Trustees Henry Perry and Frank Gallegos, in exchange for their support or not running in the 2011 Teamsters International Election. The payoffs, apparently to last for one year, would have cost the IBT treasury at least a quarter of a million dollars—and that doesn’t include the value of the extra pension offered to Zuckerman.
The three, who are to be commended, declined the offers—for whatever reasons: perhaps integrity or perhaps they just couldn’t endure the way Hoffa was running the union. Zuckerman and Perry currently are vice presidential candidates opposing the Hoffa slate in the upcoming IBT election.
IBT Election Supervisor Richard W. Mark uncovered the attempted misuse of Teamsters’ dues money during a six-month-long investigation ordered by Kenneth Conboy, the Teamsters Election Appeals Master. In a strange decision, Mark said there was nothing he could do about the unsuccessful scheme because Zuckerman, Gallegos and Perry refused to go along—and didn’t collect any money.
Expressing his dismay over Mark’s failure to punish Hoffa and company, Perry told the Memphis Commercial Appeal: “It was like, you go in the bank, you pull the gun, you hear the police coming, you run out. You didn't commit a crime.”
Conboy, in effect agreed with Perry’s assessment by ordering Mark to go back to the drawing board to impose a penalty but one short of disqualifying Hoffa as a candidate.
In issuing that directive to Mark, Conboy maligned the memory of Ron Carey by saying “In that case, Ron Carey, the IBT president elect in 1996 knew of a scheme to launder hundreds of thousands of dollars of union funds for the benefit of his campaign.” Conboy either is unaware of the exoneration of Carey by the Manhattan federal court—or isn’t willing to acknowledge that the subsequent evidence emerged to show that Carey should never have been disqualified.
In the same vein in light of the outcome of his trial, I have never understood why Carey was not reinstated as a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
Mark now has the burden of figuring out what his solution should be for Hoffa and company’s failed attempt to use the members’ money in their reelection campaign.
Hoffa must also be wondering whether the Teamsters Independent Review Board will investigate the case and wallop him with a penalty that could end his bid for the union presidency.
Fred Gegare, who filed the original complaint that ultimately resulted in Mark’s investigation and is running against Hoffa for the presidency, contends that just like Carey, Hoffa should be disqualified from running again and expelled from Teamsters.
Sandy Pope, the New York Teamster running for the presidency, said in one on her releases, “It’s an open secret that Hoffa uses our dues money to reward his supporters—and to funnel them extra salaries in exchange for campaign contributions. But this is the first time the problem has been officially documented.”

MARK HULKOWER remembered

2011-02-11T18:34:00.000-08:00

Mark Hulkower, the brilliant litigator who played a crucial role in saving the late Teamsters president Ron Carey from prison and lasting disgrace, died of cancer last Saturday at the age of 53.
Carey had been put through five years of hell--dumped from the presidency of the Teamsters and pilloried in the press for supposedly participating in a rip off of union funds—before he finally went to trial in Manhattan federal court in the fall of 2001.
Hulkower was part of a potent defense team that included two other lawyers from the Washington, DC firm of Steptoe & Johnson: Reid Weingarten and Bruce Bishop with Bob Hauptman, Carey’s former Special Assistant for Management and Budget, serving as the researcher, analyst of the documents used in evidence, and a source of insight into the operations of the complex union.
Hulkower and Weingarten subjected the prosecution’s key witness to devastating cross-examinations which revealed the government’s case was a lie.
Among the many successful assaults on that witness was one in Hulkower asked with almost boyish innocence: “Would you steal money from the (Carey) campaign?” The witness responded, “No sir.” Then Hulkower produced piles of invoices showing that this crucial government witness was indeed a thief who stole from the campaign.
After the jury returned the verdict exonerating Carey, Hulkower made the pithy observation that the case was “a Greek tragedy with a happy ending.”

THE JYNX review

2011-01-23T10:07:00.000-08:00

I got a pleasant surprise today when I checked out THE JYNX on Smashwords finding this review:
Review by: Charles Aylworth on Dec. 28, 2010 :
Up to the minute gender-reversed romance novel. A good read, well worth the time. You can almost name the major players, especially if you are a fan of faux-news.

To Ed Lowe: My regrets

2011-01-16T12:49:00.000-08:00

To Ed Lowe, who died on Saturday, I offer my regrets for never having told him—as I intended--that I based a character on him in my novel, THE JYNX.
My character, Ted Neary, not surprisingly was a widely-read Newsday columnist who was the catalyst in transforming protagonist Billy Plunkett from an obscure wood sculptor into one with a national reputation.
Ted Neary enters the novel in Chapter Forty One:

First Billy spotted the old Plymouth Horizon parked in front of the house, then he saw the guy sitting on the front porch in the rocker with his feet propped up on the railing, slugging beer from a bottle.
He wanted to find out what the stranger was doing on the porch before he unloaded his gear. He walked up the porch steps and immediately recognized him. Ted Neary. The wire glasses, the black mustache and thick black hair on his head. Even the baggy sports jacket. He had seen Neary interviewed on TV and his picture in the paper a couple of times a week. He remembered the opening words of the column he did on Tommy Ledge a good number of years ago. “When Tommy Ledge, Huntington’s legendary clammer, isn’t scooping up those delicious bivalves somewhere on Huntington Bay, he can be found on his favorite bar stool in Sugar’s.”
“Hey,” Neary said with the grin that was part of his anatomy as Billy came onto the small porch.
Billy responded, “My name is Ted Neary and I write a newspaper column.” That was Neary’s pitch on radio and TV ads for his column. “Why are you here? You looking for another legend?”
Neary’s grin grew stretching almost to his ears. “I thought you might like a beer,” he said proffering the cardboard carrier with four Budweisers left in it.
“Looks like you had a two beer wait.”
“Nice day. I didn’t mind. How’d the clamming go today?”

I remember writing about the Ted Neary character with pleasure and with a clear vision of the beer-drinking, always smiling Ed Lowe in mind.
I worked with Ed for 30 years. Among my brightest memories was a night before Christmas Eve in the early 1970s before he became a columnist. Ed had an assignment to do a human interest story in keeping with the season. He wrote the item in verse to the beat of the Night Before Christmas. Before the story even reached the desk almost everyone in the city room had read and enjoyed it as an original, hilarious piece of writing.
The editor on the desk, who was rather a stiff, straight-laced creature, flashed through Ed’s offering and said with consternation on his face: “We can’t print this; it rhymes.” His reaction filled the city room with a mixture of contempt and laughter.
I’m not sure, but I think Ed’s version got in that Christmas Eve edition of Newsday. If it didn’t, it should have.

THE DAME, THE NAME, THE DISENCHANTED

2011-01-01T19:32:00.000-08:00

If I were a twitterer, this would be my offering for this year’s race for general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters:
The 2011 Teamsters election summarized: The dame (Sandy), the name (James), the disenchanted (Fred).
The dame, of course, is Sandy Pope, president of New York Teamsters Local 805. Dame can be use as a term for a woman, but I am using it in the expansive concept of a woman of accomplishment. In the United Kingdom, they bestow the title on female high achievers—and that’s what Sandy is. Sandy is a real Teamster having worked her way up from the hard jobs of selector and truck driver.
The name, obviously, James P. Hoffa, the son of Jimmy Hoffa, an earlier Teamster president of some repute. James P. rode his father’s name into the Teamsters presidency in 1999. His claim to being a Teamster comes from summer jobs in his college years and then becoming a lawyer for various IBT entities a couple of years after graduating from law school.
The disenchanted candidate is Fred Gegare, another real Teamster up from the rank and file from Green Bay Wisconsin, who was a vice president on Hoffa’s team until he stunned Teamsters through North America last summer when he announced he could no longer endure Hoffa’s pitiful performance as general president. He says on his campaign website: “"Over the last twelve years, James Phillip Hoffa has proven that running a union of 1.4 million members like a family fiefdom is disastrous. He has shown that the Teamsters Union will not be successful as long as it is run from Washington, D.C. by unelected lawyers, consultants and personal assistants. Just like Hoffa, they have never done the work of real Teamsters. Just like Hoffa, they are more concerned with taking care of themselves than about fighting for the members."
Another shock to Hoffa came last July when Tom Keegel, secretary-treasurer of the IBT, announced he would retire instead of running again on the Hoffa slate. Keegel warned that the Teamsters were being led in the wrong direction and said “"I do not claim to have all the answers, but I do know that continuing down the same road as the IBT has traveled for the last few years will not lead us out of our present difficulties or help us avoid the problems yet to come."
In my latest novel, THE TRUCKERS, there are two characters who seem to be very much like two of the real life characters in this year’s IBT election. The rank and file candidate, Carolyn Gordon, a tough, fearless woman who heads a small Truckers local in Colorado, is running against Steve Staski, a minor television and film actor. Steve is the choice of the Old Guard because he can run on the name of his famous father, Steamer Staski, The Truckers who was murdered on a picket line.
The rank and file leader Helmut Knall says to a doubting aide who thinks Carolyn doesn’t have much of a chance against the Staski name: “We’re going to get a million dollars worth of free publicity because she’s so young and she’s a woman.”
“Like Little Stevie gets because he’s a Staski and an actor,” the aide says.
Knall replies: “The difference is he acts tough. Gordon is tough. And don’t forget she made a name for herself, while he inherited his.”

Three radically different novels

2010-12-20T12:17:00.000-08:00

Over the past year, I have uploaded three radically-different novels, OOOEELIE, THE HERO, and THE TRUCKERS, onto the web primarily via Kindle, Amazon, and Smashwords.
Writers often tend to tell the same story in different forms in their train of books. Obviously, I have successfully avoided that dip in the road:
OOOEELIE’s protagonist is an Airedale, the reincarnation of a canine creature on an interstellar journey who crash-landed on earth tens of thousands of years ago. Ever since, as in all good dog stories, Oooeelie has been trying to find a way home to his planet in the Sirius (Dog Star) system. He has come down to modern times through a chain of lives as a dog with two natures: the superior being and the animal.
Ryan Garrity, whose dream of a career as a professional soldier was shattered on a battlefield in Korea, is the protagonist of THE HERO. Ryan is a bookstore operator, who suffers from the guilt of failing to have expressed gratitude to the soldier who courageously saved his life. After returning to civilian life Ryan’s savior is killed saving a young woman from an onrushing subway train in Queens. The plot of THE HERO spins around Ryan’s effort told against a background of mysticism, arrogant duplicity and murder to determine why the soldier was denied a Congressional Medal of Honor.
THE TRUCKERS is a novelistic sequel to my nonfiction book, COLLISION, about Ron Carey’s successful campaign to capture the presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from the union’s old guard. There are two protagonists in THE TRUCKERS: Tommy Kerrigan and Helmut Knall who are uneasy allies dedicated to transforming the nation’s largest union, the Truckers International Union, into a progressive force capable of dragging the American labor movement out of the quagmire that is sucking it under. Tommy emerges as a legendary hero experiencing great triumphs and tragedy. Helmut is the unwavering force behind the Truckers rank and file reform movement.

Cuban Pork for Next Thanksgiving

2010-12-01T09:34:00.000-08:00

Every Thanksgiving for the past decade or more, my family has gathered around the dining room table for our annual Thanksgiving feast: Cuban Pork.
I had lost my taste for turkey and had been searching for a substitute roast when I came across a recipe for Cuban Pork in one of the cooking magazines to which I subscribe. I’m not sure which one. When my daughter, Carol, recently asked me for the recipe, I did what everyone does in search of information, I turned to the internet.
I found the exact same recipe I have been using on MASSrecipes.com. Recipe:
Pierna De Puerco Asada (Roasted Fresh Ham)
SERVES 10- 15
Unsmoked (fresh) ham makes a delicious roast pork.
1 15-18 lb. fresh ham on the bone
Juice of 12 bitter oranges or 8 sweet oranges and 4 limes
1 head garlic, cloves separated, peeled, and minced
Pinch dried oregano
Salt

Trim off ham's outer skin and score fat about 1/2 inch deep in a diamond
pattern. Put ham in a roasting pan and set aside. Mix juice, garlic, and
oregano in a bowl and season to taste with salt. Reserving 1/2 cup, pour
juice mixture over ham, rubbing garlic into scored fat. Cover with plastic
wrap and refrigerate overnight.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Remove plastic wrap, then bake ham, basting occasionally with reserved juice mixture, until internal temperature reaches
170° on a meat thermometer, about 5 hours. Allow to rest 20 minutes before carving.

Note: We serve the Cuban Pork with black beans and rice. My recipe for the black beans:
Three cans of Bush’s black beans; two cans of chopped tomatoes; three packets of Goya spices that is “Sazon Goya sin achiote”; chop up two onions and two peppers.
Sauté the onions and pepper briefly. Add rest of the ingredients. Bring to a boil and simmer for 15 minutes.
Best consumed with a pinot noir or a dry white wine. My sons prefer beer. If you can find it, try Polar Beer—once brewed in Cuba, not Venezuela.
I fell in love with Cuban food back in 1971 when the Newsday Investigative Team spent three months in the Miami area as part of an investigation of President Richard Nixon’s pal, Bebe Rebozo.

The frightening future of newspaper production workers

2010-11-17T14:42:00.000-08:00

A frightening glimpse of the future for newspaper press operators, distributors, truck drivers, deliverers, paper manufacturers and ink makers surged into my consciousness while I lying in a hospital bed a couple of weeks ago. It was a Monday, a day I always read Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times. My traditional paper version of the New York wasn’t available so I picked up my Kindle and purchased that day’s copy of the Times in electronic form.
As I read the Times, I realized that the Kindle edition is easier to read than the paper-print version and that a grim future is near at hand for newspaper production workers. As more and more Kindles and similar e-reading devices are sold, the market for e-versions of the New York Times, Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, etc. will expand exponentially.
Pushing the expansion will be the price, ease of delivery, and the green reality. Cost: Currently, I pay $46.80 a month for the Times paper edition, while the Kindle version is $14.06 a month. Delivery: Lately, I have been enduring such lousy delivery service—no paper on five mornings on a five-week period—and wet papers almost every time it rained. An e-edition of Newsday for example appeared on screen within four seconds. The Greening Reality: Every other week, I fill two huge baskets with copies of the New York Times and Newsday to be recycled.
Just as e-books barely existed five years ago and now are taking a significant share of the books market, the growth of e-newspapers is inevitable. With that growth will come the undermining of the bargaining power of the newspaper unions, which enabled their members to enjoy decent standards of living.
Journalists will still have jobs, but the outlook for those production and distribution workers is frightening.

THE TRUCKERS novel

2010-11-05T16:44:00.000-07:00

My latest novel, THE TRUCKERS, is available as a paperback on Amazon.com and as an e-book via Amazon’s Kindle and Smashwords.com. There is no hiding the root of THE TRUCKERS: the decades-long struggle by Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) to reform the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. There are two protagonists in the novel: Tommy K and Helmut Knall. Tommy K is a daring and successful leader of both his New York local and the Truckers International Union. He flashes across the union firmament like a comet, is consumed in the process and emerges as a legendary figure. Helmut can be compared to an infantryman, an eternal soldier, who moves relentlessly and fearlessly towards the seemingly impossible goal of transforming the Truckers into a progressive union. And of course, there is the woman from Colorado.

TWO YEARS OF SHINGLES

2010-09-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday on the eve of my second anniversary of the shingles affliction in and around my left eye, I walked up to my local drug store to discover a sign in the window offering the shingles vaccine. I was happy to see the vaccine, which was somewhat difficult to get only two years ago, now broadly available.
I said to the clerk at the counter where I was picking up a prescription, “I am a poster child for the shingles vaccine. I’ve have gone through two years of suffering with shingles.”
After two years with shingles, there is little to report other than to say that nothing much has changed: the itching, aching, unpleasant sensations including a feeling of swelling continue 24 hours a day at anywhere from a mild to a significantly-irritating level around my left eye including the eyelid, eyebrow, forehead and scalp.
When the feelings get really bad, I take Advil or Tylenol, which takes off the edge but doesn’t completely relieve the symptoms. I find that taking hot baths and applying hot compresses once or twice a day helps too.
For those with the continuing onslaught of shingles, I offer my sympathy. For anyone 60 or older who has thus far escaped this minor plague, I suggest getting the shingles vaccine, Zostavax. This is the only shingles vaccine available at the moment. The vaccine gives the recipient a 50-50 chance of escaping shingles. Based on my personal experience, I would say those are good odds.

BROWSING FOR FREE ENOVELS

2010-09-04T19:25:00.001-07:00

In my relentless search for free novels in the past, I had an in-person browsing technique that provided me with some fabulous reading. I would pick a letter from A to Z, go to the fiction section of my local library (Half Hollow Hills Community Library), and go along the shelf with the authors’ names beginning with the chosen letter, say P for example.
I would read page 84 of the novels that looked interesting to determine if I should take the book home to continue reading.
The modern library with hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions, of free novels available, just like the community libraries of old, lies within the confines of the world wide web.
The selection process can be the same or a variation on my approach. Some of the sites where you can find free or modestly-priced eBooks: Smashwords (www.smashwords.com), obooko (www.obooko.com), Jennifer Armstrong’s Free-online-novels (www.free-online-novels.com); Adam Decker’s onlinenovels.net; Online novels (online-novels.blogspot.com); and Wattpad (www.wattpad.com).

Glenn Beck as prophet

2010-08-29T14:06:00.000-07:00

Glenn Beck went on stage at the Lincoln Memorial Saturday (Aug. 28, 2010) in the role of prophet before an audience of 87,000 to 500,000 fans, an unknown number of whom are true believers. Beck told the gathering: “America today begins to turn back to God. For too long, this country has wandered in darkness."
In inflating his role from television/cable/radio performer into one entrusted by God to bring about a new American religious revival, Beck fulfills the vision of Budd Schulberg in “A Face in the Crowd” (1957) in which the leading character, Larry (Lonesome) Rhodes, played by Andy Griffith, blossoms from an insignificant wandering small-town entertainer into a television personality with a massive, hypnotized following.
Lonesome Rhodes’ downfall resulted from the foolish mistake (repeated by so many politicians since) of laughing in the presence what he thought was a dead mike at his audience as a bunch of hooples.
On the other hand, Beck’s bubble may never burst, instead lifting him ever upward towards heaven or the heavens.

Obscure Novelists like me

2010-08-25T09:48:00.000-07:00

I ordered a Kindle today (Aug. 23, 2010) with the intention of using it to review novels by obscure indie writers like me. Two years ago, I set out to review such novels buying paper versions or printing them from online sites but only managed to do a couple before being hit by shingles in my left eye, which ended that undertaking for over a year.
Unfortunately, several of those novels proved to be dreadfully unreadable. Since I have a policy of only reviewing obscure novels that I enjoyed or could recommend, I didn’t bother writing about those.
I assume having a Kindle will make the reading of obscure novels a lot easier; I plan to focus my obscure novelist effort on free eBooks or those costing .99 cents or thereabouts.
Of course, I’ll continue to read and review the traditional novels that come into my possession either through purchase or gift. In the case of the traditionals, I usually focus on a particular aspect of the book—a great character, an interesting plotline, etc.—rather than providing a full fledged review since the usual newspaper, magazine and online reviewers are fulfilling that need.
As with everything, I Googled various takes on obscure novels to see what others might have written. The Googley results: 57 hits in “best obscure novels;” 24,000 in “obscure novels;” and 985 “obscure novelists.”

Substantially wrong

2010-08-22T13:23:00.000-07:00

On Aug. 21, 2010, in a front page story about the upcoming film, “The Social Network” two New York Times writers offered staggeringly erroneous conclusions about the substance of two great films: “The Godfather” and “Network.”
The Times story said, “If ‘The Godfather’ was about family and ‘Network’ about rage, ‘The Social Network’ appears to be mostly about emptiness.”
I wondered if the writers had seen or thought about either "The Godfather" or "Network." So here are my corrections of their analyses:
“The Godfather” (1972) is about a criminal warlord, a Machiavellian figure who has made himself a prince of the underworld through murder, bribery, and political skills. Don Corleone is not the head of a family, but the leader of a coterie of vicious, lethal, cruel outlaws.
Paddy Chayefsky’s masterpiece, “Network” (1976) deals not with rage, but forecasts the corporatization, the corruption, the dumbing down of a significant segment of today’s television and cable shows that pretend to be delivering news, but in reality are shallow entertainments and political propaganda.
I hope that “The Social Network,” inspired by Facebook, turns out to be worth watching for substance rather than emptiness. So many films of modern times are nothing but special effects and chase scenes.

WHO IS LISBETH SALANDER?

2010-07-31T09:32:00.000-07:00

Lisbeth Salander is Cool Hand Luke, Jesse James, Dillinger, Robin Hood, Bill Munny (the gunman in the “Unforgiven”). Salander, the heroine of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, is a modern outlaw (or should I say outsider) of epic proportions who uses modern e-weapons (computers and i-phones) with devastating skill.
The magnificent character that Larsson has created is who lifts his three thrillers (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, “The Girl Who Played with Fire”, and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”) far above the pack of this genre that pours into book stores year in and year out.
Of course, the three books are really one novel. The first and third books propel the reader; the middle book, “The Girl Who Played with Fire”, drags, but is necessary to consume, no matter how disappointedly, to understand the final book.
Should Salander serve as a role model, girls and young women will aspire to be bi-sexual, unforgiving almost predatory avengers, fearless and unbelievably effective in a fight against any man no matter how fierce, totally self-confident, capable of financing their lives by stealing from the unworthy rich, and most of all super hackers.

THE CREATIVE IMPULSE

2010-06-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

When my sisters, Gloria and Miriam, came over for dinner recently, I gave each a copy of my science fiction novel, OOOEELIE. After we had our goat cheese on slices of baguette; lamb tagine on flavored rice, red wine and water, and finally a strawberry tart with whipped cream accompanied by Scottish tea, Gloria held up OOOEELIE and asked, “Why do you write novels.” I responded, “For the same reason poets write poetry, artists paint, and sculptors sculpt.”
Gloria didn’t ask the follow up question and I didn’t offer what would have been the follow up response: What prompts the creative impulse. The answer lies in man emulating god; the desire to be godlike, to be a creator. How else to explain cave art, early jewelry, tattooing, the stone-age Venus figurines, the first musicians, the story tellers around the fire? From the very start, after finding food enough to fill their bellies, men and women have been driven to create.

THE HERO, a mystery

2010-06-14T16:53:00.000-07:00

THE HERO, a mystery, is my latest novel to go online. It is available on Kindle, as a paperback on Amazon, and as an e-book on Smashwords and Obooko.
The novel centers on two mysteries: the source of artificial courage and a homicide. THE HERO, set in the mid-1950s, involves the Korean War, cowardice, artificial courage, heroics, the Medal of Honor, a shaman, homicide, a mystery writer, a relentless detective, and a book store on the East Side of Manhattan.
It is worth reading. Of course, that is the author’s opinion.

OLD FRIEND

2010-05-28T14:09:00.000-07:00

I was 21 before I had the joy of seeing my first poem in print. My grandson, Cole, is 12. At that age I certainly didn’t display the talent this poem of his reveals.
I’m sure the casual reader won’t experience the pleasure I do in reading this account of our baking adventures:

Old Friend By: Cole Hattler

My old friend is my grandfather
We visit him at least once a year
We are always coming and going
Whether it is raining or snowing
But the thing we do the most at his place
Is to gather in the kitchen to sit down and bake
We bake cake and cookies
And eat them for dinner
Often times we will have some company
Who will always say our cakes look lovely
They decide it’s time to take a bite
And tell us all that is tastes just right
My old friend and I are so very proud
You even heard what our guest shouted aloud
My old friend and I, we get up early the next morning
So we may plan what we will bake next!

ON BP OPENING PANDORA’S BOX

2010-05-22T15:50:00.000-07:00

BP on a greedy quest
Gave us an oily pest

Oh tell me BP, can it really be true
Oil in the marshes is everlasting goo

(Note to readers: Feel free to add your own BP/Pandora’s Box couplet in the comment box)

WHY I WRITE

2010-04-25T11:34:00.000-07:00

Back in 1997 in an article on Renoir in the New York Times, Roberta Smith quoted the French pedagogue and painter Andre Lohte as having said "Great painters paint in order to learn to paint."
I wouldn't classify myself as a great writer, but a serious one. I would paraphrase Lohte by saying that serious writers learn to write by writing. And, I have never stopped learning.
Every so often, I ask myself why I write? I set out as a teenager to be a writer, starting with poetry, moving to short stories and finally in my early 20s to the novel. I am now 75 and my passion for writing has not diminished.
Early in my career, I became a journalist to support my writing habit and family and did a lot of free-lancing—mostly true detective stories—to supplement my income.
Try as I might I couldn’t get my novels published. Twice I wrote nonfiction books both to make some money and with the hope that a publisher would be so entranced that one of my unpublished novels would be transformed into a bookstore commodity. That didn’t happen.
Obviously my failure to sell a novel to a traditional publisher proves I don’t write just for money. Three of my novels are available through Kindle, Amazon, and Smashwords.
So why do I write. Any art, any pursuit of creativity is a god-like role. I found support for that hypothesis in Alexandra Sokoloff’s Screenwriting Tricks for Authors blog of Jan. 18, 2010, a perceptive critique of the Wizard of Oz, which ends with: “You are the writer. Ultimately, it’s you and the page. You are God, baby. Make your own rules.”

POMPEII by Robert Harris

2010-04-06T14:21:00.000-07:00

I read this book at the end of 2003. What follows are my notes to myself.
X Jan. 1, 2004: I finished reading “Pompeii” Robert Harris’ latest novel last night. The characters, the story, and the physical and historic setting carried me along. There were two glaring false notes in the writing. The first in a scene in which the reader hears a conversation between the antagonist, Ampliatus, and a character whose identity is hidden as a device to build suspicion and suspense. That might be appropriate in a film, but not in a novel with an omniscient narrator. The second and worst false note because it is a copout comes in the conclusion of the book. The eruption of Vesuvius is set up as inescapably murderous—with the protagonist, Attilius, the acquarius, and Corelia, a girl he has risked his life to rescue, plunging themselves into the Roman water system to escape the lava, fire, and smothering ash of the volcano. Not good enough. They wouldn’t have escaped. So the author tries to present their ending as part of a myth of a man and woman who seemed to rise from the earth in escaping death from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Once again, Harris stepped away from the omniscient narrator to a hapless device to deal with an insoluble problem if he is to have a happy ending. So once again, I have read a book that was impressive in the process, but failed in the end.
I must say that Harris’“Fatherland” was a marvel of writing, setting and story telling. It is one of my favorite books.
“Pompeii” tells the story of Attilius, a Roman acquarius, sent to the Naples region to replace another acquarius, which is a waterworks engineer, who has disappeared. The book provides interesting detail about the Roman aqueducts and the men who maintain them. The story is set against the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the disappearance of Pompeii under the volcano’s hot ash. There are some very shaky transitions in the book. During the course of the story, Attilius discovers a corrupt entrepreneur has murdered the missing acquarius; Attilius falls in love with the entrepreneur’s daughter; the daughter has come to hate her greedy father; and Attilius is displayed as somewhat of a superman of intellect and morality with boundless luck fostering him, saving him from death and destruction.

SHINGLES AFTER A YEAR AND A HALF

2010-03-15T10:56:00.000-07:00

Based on my experience what to expect after 18 months with shingles:
The shingles attack on my left eye began on Sept. 15, 2008. In the aftermath, I still have itching, aching (sometimes feeling like some one punched me in the eye, swelling, soreness, an unpleasant pressure, and numbness on my eyelid, above the eye, along the left side of my nose, on the left side of my forehead, and in the scalp. In addition, I get fatigued rather easily.
Oh, by the way, the little miseries of the aftermath are a 24-hour-a-day constant.
How have I improved? Within the past two weeks, I found I could read in bed again. I have been reading in bed for a half hour to an hour since my earliest boyhood. So I lost that pleasure for about 17 months. I have returned to limited reading, watching films again on cable, using the computer, a more restricted writing schedule, and exercise—although not as heavy as before shingles.
When this process began, my doctor told me not to expect a quick cure; that was followed a few months later with the doctor telling me to expect the aftermath to last from six months to a year. This past December, the doctor told me the aftermath probably would continue for another two to three years. That last diagnosis could be on the mark because I am 75 and people my age have been known to die in two or three years.
My great hope is to wake up one morning symptom-free. As an alternative, I would settle for diminished itching, aching, etc.

Free e-books

2010-03-06T13:15:00.000-08:00

Considering the issue of free e-books called to my mind a scene from a 1954 invitation to dinner at the home of Dot and El in Queens Village. Dot had been a high school classmate in upstate Binghamton of my girlfriend Ginger, now my wife.
The occasion was memorable for two reasons: for the first time in my life, I was 20, I ate spaghetti and meatballs in a tomato-based sauce. Even though I consumed pizza with gusto, I had steadfastly refused the classic spaghetti and meatballs made by my mother at home or on family outings to Italian restaurants. Crossing that culinary line plunged me into a love affair with pasta that has continued through the years.
And, the second reason: As we entered the little house in Queens Village those 55 years or so ago, the television was playing a commercial pitch that caught El’s attention. He waited until the TV offer was finished before he turned off the set and said with a smirk, “Nothing down, nothing to pay, just come in and take it away.”
El’s words bubbled to the surface of my mind a couple of years ago when I put my novel, THE DREAM DANCER, online as a free e-book. I was in search of an audience since I couldn’t get an agent willing to peddle the book to a traditional publisher. In the interim, I’ve learned that writers often offer their books free online as a stratagem to lure readers to buy their other works. So the free e-book is a good device for a writer in search of an audience and possibly paying readers.
Curious about the source of El’s immortal phrase “nothing down, nothing to pay, just come in and take it away” I Googled it. No hits with full expression, but 1,011 hits on shorter version of “nothing down nothing to pay.”
So, I now credit El as the originator of his wry remark: “Nothing down, nothing to pay, just come in and take it away.”

WILLIE into OOOEELIE

2010-02-10T12:31:00.000-08:00

My latest novel, OOOEELIE, is now available as a Kindle and soon as a paperback on Amazon as well as e-books on Smashwords and obooko.
To sum up the novel: The Oooeelie Myth: A dog, the reincarnation of a canine being whose space ship crash-landed on earth tens of thousands of years ago and taught humans to speak, is still trying to find his way home to Sirius in the Twentieth Century.
The seed for the book was my admiration for courage and intelligence of my wife Ginger’s Airedale, Willie.
The role of walking Willie night and day fell to me. One of our frequent walks was to the mail box about three blocks away.
In his puppyhood, I would let Willie off the leash as I ran laps around our local park. Unfortunately, he decided to play a game of you-can’t-catch me with me. He began running off with me in pursuit and unable to catch him as would stay just beyond my reach. This would go on until he tired of the tease.
In reaction, I began leaving the leash attached to Willie while I did my running. One day, the game began as usual, but he took it to another level: he not only stayed beyond my reach, he ran off disappearing into the distance. I searched the neighborhood for him on foot and in car, then just accepted the fact that Willie was gone.
A couple of hours went by. A neighbor knocked on my door to ask: “Is that your Airedale down by the mail box”
He said he had tried to pick up the leash, but the dog bared his teeth. I trotted to the mailbox and lo and behold: Willie was sitting there patiently awaiting my arrival. It was a happy reunion.
As a result, I tied Willie to a goal post whenever I ran around the park. I usually walked a mile and half before I began running so he got plenty of exercise before being attached to the post.
I was at the other end of the park when I saw a father and son team who walked a huge Australian dog of some sort. I had heard about the dog terrorizing other dogs in the park—much to the amusement of the father and son. As I drew closer, they let their monster of an aggressive dog loose and he charged Willie.
What a mistake. Anyone who is familiar with the Airedale nature could predict what happened next. Willie tore into his attacker. The father and son had to pull him away from their dog. As I approached, the father said, “Dogs usually sit and submit when(Brutus or whatever his name was) goes after them.”
I never saw them again.
In case you wonder how I arrived at the name Oooeelie, I did so by taking the W in Willie and extending it to ooo, and the i to ee. Put together with the rest of his name, it becomes Oooeelie.
Willie died at age 14 on May 20, 2001. I buried him by the big rock in our back yard facing north (he preferred the cold and the snow) with his favorite stuffed animal, which was a soft white doll shaped like a gingerbread man, a bowl and some food; he was wrapped in the cover he usually slept on in the living room.
In death, he looked as though he were running. He looked alive, but his soul was gone. Ginger asked where I thought the spirits of animals went after they died. I have to believe they go to heaven or are reincarnated.
Everything is a piece of God so perhaps Willie returned to God.

FOOLS CROW

2010-02-08T15:11:00.000-08:00

FOOLS CROW by James Welch (1986)is a novel about the Blackfeet just after the Civil War when the whites were expanding into the tribe’s homeland.
Welch is a writer who creates another world; the novel is a journey from one end of the Blackfeet experience when the hero, Fools Crow, is becoming a full fledged warrior to the point when he realizes that the way of life that his people revered and enjoyed is going to expire with the whites overwhelming them and destroying their culture.
This is a book that should be taught in high schools to give students insights into Native America culture. Besides it would introduce them to James Welch, a great American writer.

My 99-cent novels

2010-02-03T14:32:00.000-08:00

I recently cut the price of my three novels, OOOEELIE, THE DREAM DANCER, and THE JYNX to 99 cents on Kindle. After trying to sell them at $3.99 and $4.99, I came to accept Joe Konrath’s sage advice on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing that “Cheap sells. Free sells even more.”
Of course, I knew all about free. The three novels are offered as free e-books on Smashwords and obooko, while they are up for sale at bargain prices on Kindle and as paperbacks on Amazon.
In reality, Joe Konrath might have saved me $500. Seeing that my three novels weren’t moving, I decided to set out to push OOOEELIE with an advertising budget of $500. Research showed me that I could place classified ads in two literary publications for three months for a total of a little more than $300.
Further research led me to Konrath and others, but he was the best leaving me convinced that paid advertising might very well be a waste of money for an author as insignificant me.
On Monday, Feb. 1, 2010, Kindle listed the books at 99 cents for the first time—and I sold a copy of THE DREAM DANCER that day. As any author knows, there is no more a joyous feeling than selling a book or I should say books. For an Indie-author like me one book excites that feeling. Maybe it takes a 100,000-book-day to stir James Patterson.

Ron Carey’s successor

2009-12-10T16:46:00.000-08:00

A big, burly, bearded Brooklynite UPS worker named Tim Sylvester inherited the late Ron Carey’s prestigious mantle as the rank and file reformer of Teamsters Local 804 in an election triumph on Dec. 3 that can only be described as breathtaking.
Sylvester won the presidency of Local 804 with his Members United Slate ousting the incumbents by a vote of 2,348-1091, a margin than two to one. Local 804 has 8,000 members and covers UPS’ crucial New York market.
While his victory was stunning, it came not by chance, but by building a movement in Local 804 to oppose concessionary contracts and to demand the local’s officers keep the membership informed instead of in the dark about negotiations—reflecting the philosophy of rank and file participation espoused by the ever-militant Teamsters for a Democratic Union. Sylvester and Jim Reynolds, his partner in transforming Local 804 are affiliated with TDU. Reynolds was elected Local 804’s secretary-treasurer on the Members United Slate.
Carey’s career can be broken into three shining rank and file reform moments: his election to the presidency of Local 804 in 1967; his election as General President of International Brotherhood of Teamsters with crucial support from TDU in 1991; and the great victory over UPS on the picket lines and at the bargaining table in 1999, again with the backing of TDU in an era when most unions were fearful of striking.
The 52-year-old Sylvester, who has been a Teamster and a UPS worker for 30 years, matched Carey’s 1967 achievement in ousting the current administration from Local 804, now headed by Howie Redmond, a long-time an ally of Carey who transferred his allegiance wholeheartedly to James P. Hoffa when he won the general president’s seat in 1999. Hoffa came to power after Carey was dumped from office on corruption charges—later proven to be untrue. Ousting an incumbent local Teamsters administration is the equivalent of defeating a sitting Member of Congress; it can be done, but not easily.
Whether Sylvester blossoms into a candidate for General President of the Teamsters will depend on luck and his performance as the top officer of Local 804. The next election for General President of the Teamsters will be in 2011—not much time for Sylvester to jell into a star with a national reputation for leadership.
But the next candidate backed by TDU to run against Hoffa and his allies in Washington will have to be someone just like Tim Sylvester, a Teamster leader up from the rank and file with a hunger to craft an activist union.

Shingles aftermath forever?

2009-11-27T13:00:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago, for the first time in 14 months I felt the aftermath of shingles receding. There was the slightest sensation just above the right corner of my left eye. The shingles aftermath was still there, but barely. In the morning, I awoke to the full fledged, unpleasant presence of the shingles aftermath: swelling, itching, aching, all-around unpleasantness. It hasn't abated since. I wonder how long this will go on? Perhaps for the rest of my life. Along with the day-long and night-long discomfort, there is the exhaustion factor. I get fatigued very easily, sometimes painfully so.

THE DEATH OF JIM LONEY

2009-10-30T19:01:00.000-07:00

THE DEATH OF JIM LONEY
by James Welch
I had to push myself through THE DEATH OF JIM LONEY (Harper & Row/1979). This was Welch's third novel and a pretty shabby work in comparison to what he would produce in the future (meaning FOOL CROWS and THE HEARTSONG OF CHARGING ELK). I consider Welch one of the best writers I have read. The protagonist, Jim Loney, is a loser from the outset, who in the end is shot to death by an Indian policeman for a killing which was accidental. The novel is primarily a character study of the low-lifes around an Indian reservation in Montana. Loney is a half breed, torn between two cultures, and is an uneducated, aimless wino. He has a sister, who wants to rescue him as does his attractive girlfriend, a white school teacher from Texas. He doesn't want to be saved because of the emptiness of his soul. He has never recovered from being abandoned, along with his sister, by his reckless mother and his drunken father. Had this been the first Welch book I read, I would have skipped the others at a great loss to myself since his later books are wonders to be treasured.

New Indie-author outlet

2009-10-27T14:42:00.000-07:00

Like most Indie authors I am always on the outlook to expand the distribution network of my novels, for sale and for free. Recently, I discovered obooko, a year-old free eBook site based in Great Britain. The process of uploading your book onto obooko is very simple indeed. Obooko distributes novels, nonfiction, and poetry worldwide on the PDF platform so that the potential audience needs only a computer rather than an eBook or Kindle-type device.
Adding to the pleasure of finding obooko onto which I loaded my novels, THE DREAM DANCER and THE JYNX, I discovered a link to BookCoverPro, which sells modestly-priced programs to rather easily create your own book covers. I went through some agony in the past trying to figure out a means of designing book covers transferable to the web for full-cover paperbacks and front cover eBooks. I failed to find any that would do the job for a reasonable cost.
BookCoverPro was the answer to my cover-creating crisis. Like most authors, my computer skills are limited. I spent a couple of weeks struggling through the process of the first cover. I did the second cover in half an hour. I bought the program with the intention of doing covers for six novels so the price didn’t put me off: there are two BookCoverPro programs, the standard for $97 and the deluxe for $187.
In a future blog, I will provide my guide for the Indie-author with limited computer skills, like me, to put together a cover with the BookCoverPro program.

THE ONLY MONARCH

2009-09-22T19:11:00.000-07:00

On the eve of fall, Sept. 21, 2009, my wife Rae spotted a Monarch Butterfly on the Buddleia Butterfly Bush in our backyard on Long Island. She immediately called me to share the wonder of seeing the only Monarch we have seen this summer, and this on the last day of summer.
In the past we have always seen Monarchs, plenty of them, in August at our local town park and in our backyard. This year, we saw very few butterflies of any sort in either place—normally we see many. This summer, we spotted a couple of Black Swallowtails and Eastern Tiger Swallowtails.
I read that the wet, cold spring of 2009 had damaged the butterfly population. Our experience seems to be proof of that. Or, is Global Warming at play in diminishing the butterfly numbers?

A Year of Shingles

2009-09-15T13:32:00.000-07:00

On Sept. 15, 2009, I completed a full year of affliction with shingles centered on my left eye. There have been times just in the past week for very brief spans when I would say my eye and the area around was feeling neutral—usually in the first closing of my eyes to sleep. Then the pressure or the itching or the distant ache return would return.
I am now writing for two hours a day—that is, two one-hour segments. I can read newspapers and books again, but for limited spans. And, I can watch TV, but with my left eye mostly closed.
TV watching with the left eye seems to provoke my shingles.
One affliction that hasn’t abated is fatigue. After a curtailed daily exercise (stretching, 25 sit-ups, walking a mile and three-quarters, a brief tai chi routine), followed by breakfast, and then writing for an hour, I am at the very least tired and sometimes exhausted. So I lay down for an hour to listen to WNYC or a book on CD, often falling asleep.
I get tired quickly even doing any light physical work like cutting a small section of the lawn or raking a few bags of leaves.
My great hope is that the shingles finally is diminishing to a lesser presence. As I type this, I feel a very light pressure on a corner of my left eye. On the scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the worst, I would say my eye is at a 1, mostly it is a 3.
Friends and relatives ask: Why can’t the doctor do something for you? My answer is: If he could, he would.

THE RUINS by Scott Smith

2009-08-28T12:52:00.000-07:00

X THE RUINS by Scott Smith
Read by Patrick Wilson, who has a nice, clear voice.
(Simon & Schuster Audio)July 2006
Scott Smith goes far beyond the usual horror story in THE RUINS. The book came across to me as a metaphor for global warming as six tourists on a day trip to an archeological site in a Mexican jungle stumble into the jaws of a pitiless adversary.
Smith presents us with six clearly defined characters including a flighty woman, a serious woman, a male weakling, two very strong, resourceful men, and a happy Greek, who doesn’t speak English so he can’t communicate with his companions. In addition there is a language gap between the day trippers and Mayan villagers who try, but fail to warn them of the awful danger awaiting them.
I found myself saying: “This is what I would do” to escape the tangle in which the characters have fallen. That is the mark of a worthwhile author, who draw the reader (or in this case the listener)that far into the story.

THE GIRL OF HIS DREAMS

2009-08-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

THE GIRL OF HIS DREAMS by Donna Leon, a Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery (BBC Audio) narrated by David Colacci (8 cds)
Written from the perspective of Commissario Brunetti, the novel’s protagonist who is a Venetian police detective, we only see what he sees, knows, and does—so there are some issues left hanging, as there are in real life. Brunetti is what we would like every police officer to be, especially those who wander into our lives. He is thoughtful, considerate, wise, caring, self-aware, and a first-class investigator.
What I find amazing about this novel is that it is Donna Leon’s 17th about Commissario Brunetti, but it reads (or I should say speaks) with an originality that is breathtaking. I have found in my decades of reading that an author’s first or second book in the mystery, police procedure or thriller genres are usually the best with a steep slide downhill thereafter as the main character and the writer become worn by repetition.
Of course, THE GIRLS OF HIS DREAMS, was the first Leon novel to which I have been exposed. I plan to go back to read the first and then a more current one. For birthday gifts, I have ordered her first novel, DEATH AT LA FENICE (1992), for my wife, Rae, and her 18th novel, ABOUT FACE (2009), for my sister, Miriam.
David Colacci, the narrator, has a wonderfully clear and interesting voice, which is so important in a CD-Book. I find that most readers with accents, Italian, British or otherwise, are impossible to hear comfortably—so I dump those CDs immediately.
Police departments around the world would do well to ask their detectives and front line police officers to read Donna Leon to a find model in Commissario Brunetti for behavior and investigative procedure.
If Cambridge (MA) Police Sgt. James Crowley had followed the Brunetti approach, he would have asked Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. not only for his ID, but for his phone number in their famous meeting in the doorway of Gates’ home. In the Brunetti mode, Crowley would have called his dispatcher to double check and call the number. After the phone rang in the house or the professor’s pocket as they stood facing one another, he could have said, ‘I guess that clears up this case. Have a nice day Professor Gates.’
I am really looking forward to reading DEATH AT LA FENICE—after my wife finishes it, of course.

SHINGLES after TEN MONTHS

2009-07-17T14:38:00.000-07:00

After more than ten months of shingles (the affliction started on Sept. 15, 2008), I continue to have pressure, itching and aching in the area above my left eye (the eyelid, the skin between the lid and brow, the eyebrow, and the forehead).
In rating the nastiness from a one to 10 (worst), I would say that my continuing problem is generally a 3 moving up to a 4 once in while. Every morning, I get up to itchiness, relieved somewhat by eye drops (Systane Ultra) which I apply twice day, per my ophthalmologist’s recommendation. Several times a day, I splash cold water on my eye for momentary relief and I find that taking a hot bath or shower relieves the symptoms somewhat.
Fatigue still hits me whenever I do any substantial work or exercise. I continue on a reduced exercise routine: stretches and 25 sit-ups in the morning, followed by a mile-and-a-half walk and tai chi. A few months ago, I tried to return to my full exercise program, which is much extensive than the one cited—and I became so exhausted barely made it home in the half-mile walk from my local park. I don’t do push-ups because of the discomfort I feel in the area around the eye.
Recently, my wife, Rae, got the anti-shingles vaccine (Zostavax) which was approved only three years ago by the FDA. With the vaccine, one has about 50-50 chance of avoiding shingles. For someone who has endured it for ten months—and faces months or years more, the 50-50 odds of escaping shingles seems like a worthwhile choice.

THE DANCER UPSTAIRS by Nicholas Shakespeare

2009-07-05T15:47:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Shakespeare wrote THE DANCER UPSTAIRS twice—as an intriguing novel in 1995 and a screenplay that became a riveting film in 2002. I wish I could have read the screenplay, but I was unable to find a copy either for sale or free on the internet.
An aspiring screenwriter would do well to read the novel and then to watch the film. As good as the novel was, the film, directed by John Malkovich, was even better. In the transition from novel to film, Shakespeare trimmed away a few characters and did very little reshaping of the story. This is a study in how to translate a novel onto the screen without damaging the plot or central characters.
The seed of the story, of course, is the capture of Abimael Guzmán who led the brutal Shining Path revolutionaries in Peru. In the novel, the narrator is Dyer, an enterprising journalist, who stumbles across Agustín Rejas, the detective who tracked down President Ezequiel (based on Guzman), the mysterious leader of the murderous revolutionaries. Rejas’ story unfolds in a series of interviews with Dyer in a restaurant. Dyer and a few other minor characters are excised in the transition from novel to screenplay.
I have seen the film four times and read the novel only after my entrancement with THE DREAM DANCER in its movie form. I gave the novel and the film as a birthday present to my son, Ken, who is an aspiring screenwriter.

Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest

2009-07-04T10:53:00.000-07:00

I was going through the ecstasy of eating half a Krainerwurst on a hot dog roll along with a nicely-chilled Stella Artois when I realized that I was the winner of the real sausage-eating contest: the one in my backyard, eating a single serving for pleasure (and lunch).
Every July 4th Nathan’s Famous holds a hot dog eating race in Cony Island in which the goal is to jam as many sausages and buns into the mouth and down the gullet as possible in 10 minutes. Just considering this display of gluttony has always made my stomach churn.
This year after hearing that Joey Chestnut, last year’s champion, topped his 2008 record of 59 hot dogs by downing 68 (note I say downing not eating or enjoying), I watched part of a video of the competition, I gagged and turned it off.
I have to admit I prefer Krainerwurst to hot dogs and I’m super-lucky to be able to shop for those delightful sausages at the Forest Pork Store in Huntington Station, NY. A Krainerwurst, for the uninitiated, is smoked bratwurst. Forest Pork makes its own Krainerwurst.
My approach to Krainerwurst is to slice it in half, the long way, to grill or fry for five minutes, and to eat each half on a hot dog roll without any other embellishments: no mustard, no sauerkraut, no onions, no relish, no ketchup. The reason: the Krainerwurst has a taste alone that brings joy to the palate.

THE MEMORY OF RUNNING

2009-06-14T14:58:00.000-07:00

THE MEMORY OF RUNNING
by Ron McLarty
12.5 hours (Recorded Books)
While in the midst of the torture of shingles, I have found real pleasure in listening to books on CDs, in particular THE MEMORY OF RUNNING by Ron McLarty. This novel fits into the hero’s journey category, almost.
The protagonist is Smithson Ide, a simple, almost simple-minded 43-year-old man whose parents were killed in a car accident and who thereafter discovers his missing schizophrenic sister, Bethany, has died as a homeless person in LA. The girl next door, Norma, has loved Smithson from the age of 4 or 5. She was a cheery, wonderful kid, but four years younger than Smithson. As a result, he has never responded to her adoration and love.
In the opening of the novel, Smithson has become a drunk, an overeater of junk food, is 279 pounds, is unmarried, and is floating unhappily through life as a supervisor in a factory that makes GI Joe figures.
At the age of 10, Norma, the happy girl next door was hit by a truck or car and is doomed to spend the rest of her life in a wheel chair. Although she is bitter about her circumstances, she has created a career for herself as a draftsman working at home on architectural and artistic projects. Norma never relents in her pursuit of Smithson, loving him even though he has grown into a grossly-overweight loser and despite his continued indifference towards her.
Smithson sets out on a cross-country journey, a quest to collect his beloved sister’s body from a morgue/funeral home in Venice Beach, Calif. The trip, made possible in part by Norma, transforms Smithson from a slob into a real person.

THE JYNX sales

2009-05-22T12:46:00.000-07:00

Over the course of a full year my novel, THE JYNX, has sold 13 copies in paperbacks and E-books. Certainly not a glorious sales report. Why hasn’t the book sold? Obscurity. Any book promoted widely, reviewed in magazines and newspapers, and distributed through local bookstores would sell thousands of copies. I know that from my experience with two nonfiction books sold through an agent and printed and distributed by two major publishers.
Let me whine for a moment. I had plans to promote THE JYNX, which is a well-written novel with a logical plot and interesting characters. What intervened was a devastating case of the shingles centered around my left eye. That plague began Sept. 15, 2008 when I was unable to use my left eye and totally fatigued for months. Nine months later, I still have lingering problems involving eye strain and fatigue, which prevent me from reading and writing with the intensity of my pre-shingles life. I am hoping that the shingles problem will fade in upcoming months.
I estimate from the available stats that my free online novel, THE DREAM DANCER, has been read by more than 1,000 persons over the past 21 months. THE DREAM DANCER is the best novel I have written. While that feeds into the substantially larger readership being free is probably the key factor. We all enjoy the freebies online.
I am planning to make THE JYNX a free online read with the hope that a larger audience could result in larger sales numbers. And, I am going to offer THE DREAM DANCER for sale as a paperback and E-book hoping to tap into the pool of those who have read it. Whenever I read a book I love, invariably I buy copies for friends and relatives.
So, we’ll see.

THE PRICE OF SALT

2009-05-02T13:31:00.000-07:00

THE PRICE OF SALT
by Patricia Highsmith writing as Claire Morgan

The Naiad Press 1993 edition of THE PRICE OF SALT is worth reading just for the postscript by author Patricia Highsmith. The book was first published in 1951 under the pseudonym Claire Morgan.
In the postscript, Highsmith give us a rare insight into the seed that an author can grow into a marvelous novel. She was working during the Christmas rush in 1948 in the doll section of a New York department store when she was attracted to a sophisticated, elegantly-dressed female shopper. THE PRICE OF SALT was spun from that moment.
The book describes how Therese, the department store temp was drawn into a love affair with that chic woman, Carol. The difficulties of being lesbian lovers in 1940s America in an era when most men were appalled at the concept are filtered into the story. Carol comes out on the wrong side of a divorce as a result of her relationship with Therese. And, Therese discovers her own sexual preferences and an explanation of why she hasn’t been drawn to feel anything more than friendship for the men who are attracted to her.
Highsmith, who used a pen name on THE PRICE OF SALT to avoid being categorized as a lesbian writer, can be place in a box labeled ‘crime novelist’ for good reason. Her first novel was STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, which Alfred Hitchcock made into the notable film of the same name. Another of the readily-recognized films made from her work is THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY.
Obviously, Highsmith met a deep-seated need among readers with THE PRICE OF SALT since the 1952 paperback version of the book sold almost a million copies.

WE DID REMAIN

2009-04-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

WE SHALL REMAIN, the title of the PBS American Experience five-part series on Native Americans, prompted in me the false assumption that the programs would deal with the survival of their cultures, languages and religions. I should have paid more careful attention to the words of the title: “shall” of course implies the future.
While so many Native Americans were pushed ever-westward onto dreary reservations, a number of nations, bands, or tribes—whatever they want to be called—somehow managed to remain as islands in the flood of white Europeans along the East Coast. If the American Experience had been about them, it would have been entitled WE DID REMAIN.
My best novel, THE DREAM DANCER, flows from the federal government’s decision to tear up a treaty between the United States and the Seneca Nation protecting their little piece of Northwestern Pennsylvania for the usual terms along the lines of “for as long as the grass grows and the water flows. That treaty was supposedly signed by George Washington in 1794.
Well, the grass must have stopped growing and the water flowing since the Army Corps of Engineers built a dam early in the 1960s that flooded the Seneca’s Allegany Reservation.
I became fascinated by the survival of the Iroquois culture and language and religion around 1960 when I wrote a series on the Onondaga Nation for the SYRACUSE HERALD-JOURNAL. The Onondaga and the Seneca are part of the Iroquois Confederation.
In the course of writing the series, I discovered the Queen Anne of England had sent three Silver communion sets early in the Eighteenth Century to the Onondaga, the Seneca, and the Mohawk, another Iroquois nation. The Mohawk and the Onondaga got their sets. No one was crazy enough to venture into the western wilderness to deliver the silver set to the Seneca. That set only got as far as Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, where I believe it remains.
Around 1970, I ventured to the Kinzua Dam and had lunch with the then president of the Seneca Nation. I told him about Queen Anne’s undelivered gift, which was on display at Trinity Church. He said he would have the Seneca lawyers look into the situation. I heard from the lawyers. They were considering a law suit. A few months later, I went Trinity Church and the silver set was no longer on public view.
In 1971, I wrote a novel, KINZUA, which recounted a curse on the dam and centered on an Iroquois false face society, whose incantations cause the Kinzua Dam to crack. The rush of water swept away the remains of this great betrayal of a comparatively helpless band of Native Americans by the powerful United States government. KINZUA got me an agent, who spent a couple of years trying to pedal the novel. She never found a buyer, but I never forgot the novel.
Almost 35 years later, I decided to rewrite KINZUA. In the interim, I had developed as a writer. I discovered to my dismay that I didn’t care for the original story, concept or characters. Only the name Kinzua remained as the title for my computer folder as I set out to write what became THE DREAM DANCER. I created a new band of Native Americans called the Okwe, set them in a fictional valley in Pennsylvania, and created a special relationship between the Okwe and the Great Spirit.
My agent refused to represent me on the latest version of the novel so I spent months looking for another agent to no avail. Several said they liked the book, but didn’t think it would fly in today’s market. So I put it on the internet as a free novel. You can read it at http://www.kennethccrowe.com/.
To give you an idea of what the book is about, I said in my letter to my agent in 2005: “THE DREAM DANCER is a Twentieth Century Native American fable. Coop Rever, the protagonist, is a reluctant messenger of God. He is a Native American, a war hero, a lover, a foreign correspondent, an author, a prophet, a murderer and a convict.”
And I said in a summary telling potential readers about THE DREAM DANCER:
“The story opens in Paris in the dwindling days of the summer of 1956. Coop Rever, a Native American expatriate who is the protagonist of THE DREAM DANCER, is getting ready to travel to Algeria to gather material for his third book on the French Foreign Legion. Coop is a war correspondent and author, educated at the Sorbonne under the World War II GI Bill.
“Coop is a member of the Okwe, a tiny band of Indians who have been left in relative peace in their narrow river valley in Pennsylvania for almost 200 years because of a treaty signed by George Washington that shielded their land from white predators for as long as the water flowed over the Green River Falls. The Okwe assumed that would be forever.
“One hot August day in 1956, the water stopped falling, an incident seized upon by the local congressman, Arthur Kings, to declare the treaty moot. Kings has devised a plan for the construction of a dam that would flood the valley—fulfilling a long-held dream of his family to drive the Okwe from their land.”

The next novel I will review is THE PRICE OF SALT by Patricia Highsmith writing as Claire Morgan

THE ROOT CELLAR

2009-04-05T13:16:00.000-07:00

THE ROOT CELLAR
by Joseph Damrell
Damrell has an easy writing style that is a pleasure to read; somewhat like a guy on the next barstool recounting his interesting life. His novel, THE ROOT CELLAR, takes you on a trip into Finlander shamanism and the forest spirit world.
THE ROOT CELLAR, set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, is very much an attack on a life lived just for position and acquisition absent from nature. The parallels to Carlos Castaneda are evident, although in radically different settings and ethnological backgrounds. Castaneda was an anthropologist supposedly writing nonfiction about his esoteric experiences under the guidance of Don Juan, a Yaqui Indian shaman.
Ray Karhu, the first person narrator of THE ROOT CELLAR, has found a career as a low-level functionary on archeological digs. A reluctant Ray is dragged into his experience as a Finnish-American healer/shaman by his aunt Viena, a woman from the old country steeped in the ancient knowledge of the Karelian people. Even after she dies, Viena continues to guide Ray on his trip into a more spiritual life.
The writer carries you along with some interesting twists and turns and minor conflicts. While Castaneda takes his readers to the edge of the abyss, Rays finds his way into the forest and a relationship with the animals who live there.

AMERICA AMERICA

2009-03-22T13:21:00.000-07:00

AMERICA AMERICA
By Ethan Canin
Let me say at the outset that AMERICA AMERICA is a great American novel. The book spans the nation’s economic history from the late 19th Century into the earliest 21st Century ranging from the exploitation of workers by a robber baron to the exploitation of the land by a developer.
At first I said to myself, ‘what an appropriate title, reflecting the two states of the United States: the ruling class and the aspiring class.’ But AMERICA, AMERICA is much more complicated than that: dealing with greed, presidential ambitions, economic power, personal aspirations, and most of all the concept of a fulfilled life.
The novel is set in a mythical space, mostly in the last days of a company town in upstate New York south of Buffalo and east of Lake Erie. The grandson of the robber baron still runs the town but the exploitive spirit has thinned. The scion is generous and understands the value of skilled work, while at the same time is grasping in another way--for political power. AMERICA AMERICA affirms the truism that behind every great fortune is a great crime while adding another that a great crime can undo a presidential race.
Corey Sifter, the protagonist, is from a working class family with a father whose central values are family, loyalty to friends and a deep pride in the product of his skills.
The scion of the local ruling industrial family who loves to work with own hands while at the same hungering for political position so admires Corey’s father that he provides the funds for Corey to attend a classy prep school and college. That education enables Corey to rise from the working class and even to marry the daughter of Corey’s sponsor.
But the real teacher, the shaper of Corey’s character, whether he realizes it or not, is his father who is a plumber, a union man and at the end of the trail has lived a fulfilled life.
Ethan Canin has written four novels, Blue River (1992), For Kings and Planets (1999), Carry Me Across the Water (2001), and America America (2008). I plan to read them all.

HONORING RON CAREY

2009-01-15T11:49:00.000-08:00

In 1998, Ron Carey was exiled from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters of which he was an exalted leader, first as a local union president and then as president of the international union. In ancient times, among the worst penalties imposed upon a Roman citizen was exile. Sadly, the Teamsters Independent Review Board visited the same form of suffering on Carey--ruling he could not associate with his lifetime Teamster friends or participate in any way in the union--after finding him guilty in a scheme to use the union treasury to help finance his campaign for reelection the presidency of the Teamsters.
Because the FBI could not find any real evidence to pin him directly to the funding scheme and because he repeatedly insisted in sworn testimony before federal grand juries and the Independent Review Board that he was innocent, Carey was charged with perjury.
AND THEN three years later in the fall of 2001, Carey was cleared of the perjury charge at a trial in the New York U.S. District Court.
The testimony of a single witness, who claimed that Carey okayed the rip off of the funds during a 15-second-long phone conversation, was the basis of both the Independent Review Board decision and the criminal charges.
Fortunately for Carey, he went into the trial with two of the nation’s foremost white-collar criminal defense lawyers, Reid Weingarten and Mark Hulkower of the Washington, DC firm of Steptoe & Johnson representing him. In addition, Bob Hauptman, Carey’s former Special Assistant for Management and Budget, served as the defense team’s researcher and analyst of the documents used in evidence.
The defense team proved that the crucial 15-second phone conversation never happened. Weingarten in his summation said without challenge from the federal prosecutors that their witness had been proven to be “a completely dishonest, untrustworthy, little thief.” My detailed account of the trial, The Exoneration of Ron Carey, can be accessed at the Teamsters for a Democratic Union website.
Right after Carey—still in exile--died at age 72 in December 2008,a member of his home local, Queens-based Teamsters Local 804, asked me for my thoughts on how this great union leader could be honored. After mulling the possibilities, including a statue in Union Square in Manhattan or a scholarship, I have reached the conclusion that perhaps the best way to keep the memory of Carey’s reputation and achievements alive might be to create an annual Carey Teamster Award to be given to a Teamster official or member whose activities best reflect what he tried to do for union members in his lifetime of service. The organization best suited to confer the award—whether it be a simple piece of paper or a medallion—would be Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which has been struggling for more than three decades to make the Teamsters into a better union.
One side effect of an annual Carey Teamster Award could be to provide a stage for which a potential reform candidate for international president of the union.

BODY & SOUL by Frank Conroy

2008-12-20T04:56:00.000-08:00

Frank Conroy, who died in 2005, was director of the Iowa Writers’ Conference for 18 years, and while he is celebrated for his memoir STOP-TIME, he wrote only one novel, BODY & SOUL, but what a great novel.
Throughout most of BODY & SOUL, I found the writing and the story compelling, although those qualities grow somewhat sluggish in the final quarter of the novel, but not enough to turn me off. Unfortunately, this teacher of writing committed a major story-telling faux pas by using a single sentence to look into the future of Claude Rawlings, the protagonist, undermining Aristotle’s rule that the ending should be surprising but inevitable.
Claude is the son of a very damaged woman, a Communist, grossly large (325 pounds; over 6 feet), who raises him with near criminal indifference. Emma, the mother, is saved by a black man, who moves in with her and works as a cabbie with her. In New York City in 1940s that was a relatively unusual mix, but as in any good novel, the writer has a reason for revealing the mother’s indifference to the race of her lovers.
Claude has an innate musical talent, which he works very hard to develop and throughout most of his life he appears extraordinarily fortunate in that at every turn people want to help him develop his obvious talent as a pianist and creator of music. He doesn’t have any idea who is natural father is, but Mr. Weisfeld (which I would translate as Whitefield—apparently as a name chosen purposely.) a one-time brilliant Polish composer, who lost his entire family to a bomb in the opening days of the Nazi invasion of Poland, becomes in effect the father substitute who loves and nurtures Claude. Mr. Weisfeld runs a music store on Third Avenue in the 1940s and 50s down the street from the basement apartment where Claude lives with his mother.
Through his music, Claude is exposed to the very rich of Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, gets a scholarship to an exclusive private boys’ high school in Manhattan, gets a scholarship to college, and is enabled to make a very good living at what he loves. His first love is a snooty rich girl—he loves her, but she doesn’t even consider him other than to recognize he is a talented kid. He marries a wealthy girl, who is the cousin of his first love. Claude is carried through most of the book on a wave of success UNTIL he discovers his semen is dead; he and his wife can’t have children. He falls into a depression; she leaves and divorces him. Yet, good fortune never stops smiling on Claude.
In England for the performance of his first major symphony, he runs into his first love, now relatively poor, humble, very sexy and beautiful, a recent divorcee from a wealthy man, and she has a child. She and Claude pop into bed for constant and fantastic love making. This is the point at which Conroy fails the reader by telegraphing the end: Claude wants to marry his first love, she says no. When he is 45, still handsome and inviting as a great musician, she envisions him with a 25-year-old adoring fan on each arm, while she will grow older. And in parenthesis Conroy tells us that is indeed what will happen. For the first time in the book, Conroy leaves Claude to devote a chapter to the conversation between a gay black Jazz musician and his black musician boyfriend in which their conversation reveals, that the Jazz musician, who looks pretty white, is Claude’s father, that Claude, who looks somewhat Italian, was the product of a one-night stand, the only time the Jazz man fucked a woman. So now we know the innate talent comes from.
Claude and the Jazz musician play the piano together in an incredible performance, but Claude never discovers that this man was his father. In the end, Claude who is crazily in love with his first love is drawn away from her by an opportunity to fulfill his ambitions as a concert performer. Music has shaped and directed his life and in the end is more important then a mere woman. At the same time while he is incredibly creative as a musician, he isn’t as a man—can’t have babies. The book ends with him going on stage for his big London performance.
--A subplot of the novel is that the very rich are very unhappy despite all their money. They lead rigid, boring, meaningless, limited, class-conscious lives and commit incest of sorts: Claude’s first love, as a teenager, fucking her stepfather. That drives home the point that the rich are socially incestuous, wanting their children to marry only other rich people.

AMAZON BREAKTHROUGH NOVEL AWARD II

2008-12-08T14:14:00.000-08:00

Amazon is again offering writers a chance to see their novels in print and reviewed through the second year of its Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. I entered last year while I didn’t win the contest, it opened me to a broader experience in online publishing.
Like so many writers of my generation, I wanted to avoid the stigma of vanity publishing, simply meaning paying to have your book printed. The internet has changed the rules of the game. Now a writer can put a book online for a few dollars to acquire a domain name and hosting website.
You can still spend thousands of dollars to have an online operation do all of the work involved in putting together a book: editing, layout, cover, promotion, etc.
The outcome undoubtedly will be the same as if you yourself put in the effort to put together the book and to offer it free online, for sale online or a combination of the two. When I say effort, I mean struggling through the unfamiliar processes of turning your manuscript into a worthy online book.
After decades of almost getting my novels into print through an agent, I had come to accept that my works would end up in the dustbin of the unread. Then, at the instigation of one of my grandsons, I offered my best novel, THE DREAM DANCER, as a free online novel.
Then along came the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest last year. I entered another of my novels, THE JYNX. As mentioned before, I didn’t win the contest, but I made it to the semi-finals and after the contest, Amazon offered entrants a chance to sell their online books as paperbacks (via CreateSpace) and e-books (via Kindle). The easiest way to get your novel into the Amazon process is to hire Amazon’s CreateSpace to do the job. I chose to do it myself guided by the advice offered by April Hamilton. Her THE INDIEAUTHOR GUIDE provides computer amateurs like me with all of the information needed to put together a book for online publication.
You should also consider offering your novel as an e-book via Smashwords.
All three, CreateSpace, Kindle, and Smashwords sell books under a royalty arrangement at no cost to the author.
So take your novel out of the closet and throw it into the ocean of the internet via CreateSpace, Kindle and Smashwords—and maybe someone will buy a copy.

SHINGLES AFTER EIGHT WEEKS

2008-11-17T15:02:00.000-08:00

At the end of my eighth week of enduring shingles on the left side of my face, I am once again able to use my left eye to write, read, and watch TV. Up until then (Saturday, Nov. 15, 2008), the eye was so light sensitive that I had to spend my time in darkness or with the eye closed.
Don't get me wrong, the torture of the shingles continues, but has abated somewhat. I started out with piercing pain in my eye and now have the discomfort of itching or the sense of a foreigh object is in the eye or a pressure on the eye. In reality, the sensations I mention come from the upper lid, the eyebrow, and the area between the eye and the nose. In addition, my forehead, side of the face, and scalp itch or feel pressure or are sensitive to touch (so I don't touch those areas.)
I learned a long time ago from experience kidney stone and then gall stones and in my childhood toothaches that the absence of pain is pleasure. For the past eight weeks, my life hasn't been pleasurable at all. In the grand scheme of pain, especially for the poor souls who suffer from burns, the shingles onslaught is a serious discomfort.
On Sunday, I watched a full movie for the first time in eight weeks and this entry to my blog is the beginning of my return to writing. I should mention that any physical exertion tires me enough to send me into sleep throughout the day. As a consequence, I lie awake through much of the night.
Since I was unable to read, I turned to Book on CD, which was a form of salvation along the NPR. Commercial radio generally is an emptiness unless you enjoy commercials.
At the outset, I asked my doctor how long this affliction would last. He sat silent and I pushed: "How long? Two days or a year?" The doctor responded: "Somewhere in between." Later he told me that I could expect this agony to last for at least several weeks or even six months. Well that is better than forever.

THE GREAT MAN

2008-10-06T09:01:00.000-07:00

THE GREAT MAN
by Kate Christensen
2008

In the opening chapter of THE GREAT MAN, Kate Christensen’s writing was so powerful I thought I was at the entrance to a great novel by a phenomenal writer. Teddy, the seeming protagonist, tells us at the outset why this novel is entitled THE GREAT MAN, who it turns out was her deceased, life-long lover, a totally self-centered portrait painter.
Teddy engages one of the painter's biographer’s in that first chapter in a conversation that is so rich and so revealing of personal lives that it could never had taken place in our real, dull world. But this is a novel and the conversation is entrancing. Kate Christensen can really write—especially about food. Description of the scent, texture and tastes of the food is as exotic as the dialogue.
My anticipation at the prospect of this novel quickly dulled as the writing became more mundane. So Christensen was not a genius of a writer, but a startling first chapter creator. Aside from that disappointment THE GREAT MAN carried me along. There were dead times as there quite often are in ordinary, but decently-done novels. We get to meet all of the women in the artist’s life and I would argue that he is the protagonist not Teddy or the several others used as devices to explore his relationships.
Christensen provides some interesting aspects of the continued sexuality and creativity of the elderly (those over 70) and focuses on the sensuality of food. And, she offers a nice twist about the authenticity of a work of art in the story.
The power of Christensen’s first chapter made me realize how ingrained that performance has become in a writer’s campaign to find a publisher, an agent, or a reader. In recent weeks, I have purchased novels by two indieauthors based on a reading of their first chapters and discovered that their writings fell so quickly flat and incompetent that I couldn’t finish the books. At the 1996 Sewanee Writers Conference, one of the lecturers suggested that a means of determining whether a novel might be worth reading was to read page 84. I’ve tried that many times and have been rewarded in the process. Obviously, it is a better test than a first chapter.

SHINGLES

2008-10-01T17:22:00.000-07:00

I am in my third week of a bout with shingles centered on my eye. How did this happen? I don’t remember having chickenpox as a kid, but the doctor said I probably did and the virus has lingering in my through the years waiting to pop out. A seemingly dormant volcano is the best analogy I can conceive for my herpes. The virus/lava boiled for decades somewhere deep in my system and then burst forth into my eye filling it with pain and draining my energy.
The onset of the disease began with me waking up in the middle of the night on a Monday with a sense of pressure in my eye and for some strange reason wondering if I had brain cancer. The unpleasant feeling in the eye continued through the first day. By the next day, there was a pressure in the bone on the left side of my nose and a distant ache that moved around the eye. Maybe it is my sinus, I thought. I slept through most of the third day and by the time I realized I better get to an ophthalmologist for what I thought must be an eye infection, the day was over and so were the doctor’s hours. I didn’t think it serious enough to go to an emergency room. So, I spent a miserable, painful night. I made an appointment to see my ophthalmologist, who had treated me a year ago for “a deep infection” in my left eye. Up until seeing the doctor, I had not taken any pain killers—I am a person who has both a high pain threshold and resists taking aspirin or whatever until I decide I can’t shake off the problem with meditation or deep breathing or ignoring.
The ophthalmologist decided I had sinus infection, which had moved into the eye. He prescribed antibacterial pills and eye drops. He told me to take Tylenol for the pain. That was Thursday. I got my prescriptions, took them and spent Friday in bed, in agony. By Friday night I realized I had a rash on the left half of my head—on my scalp, on my forehead, on the left side of my nose, and around my left eye and on the eyelid. I assumed I was having a reaction to the medicine. Early Saturday morning, I called the doctor. The receptionist said come right over.
As soon as I walked into the examining room, and by that time I was unable to open my eye, the doctor said, “The drugs aren’t causing that. You have shingles, herpes.” She explained it was a virus that had been lingering in my body since childhood. She prescribed a potent pill and eye drops aimed at a virus not bacteria. She told me not to expect the problem to clear up in three or four days, but to anticipate a recovery process that would take weeks. How many weeks? Who knows? On a follow up a visit a few days later, I was told to expect to experience lingering aftereffects such as fatigue and possibly pain that might last for up to a year.
In reading up on shingles, I discovered that left untreated—and even treated—the complications arising from herpes in the eye (aka herpes zoster opthalmicus) can be blindness and brain damage. Hopefully neither will afflict me since I got treated fairly early in the game, but the threat made me aware again of the dreadful outcomes facing people without health insurance. I fall under national health care, knowing in the U.S. as Medicare, and have a topnotch health insurance program backing that up.
What if I were among the 43-million uninsured in this country? I would have put off going to the emergency room until my eye closed and I couldn’t endure the pain. If I were lucky, I would be seen by a caring physician after sitting in the emergency for anywhere from a half hour to 12 hours. Hopefully that doctor would arrange for me to get the right drugs and eye drops. If I weren’t lucky and there were three gunshot wounds ahead of me in that emergency room and the doctor just wanted to push me through, I would end up as a leading candidate for blindness or brain damage. Boy, do we need national health care for our entire population.

The next novel I will review: THE GREAT MAN by Kate Christensen

THE SPIES OF WARSAW

2008-09-07T14:23:00.000-07:00

THE SPIES OF WARSAW
by Alan Furst
2008
This is the tenth novel I’ve read by Alan Furst. Sometimes I have been disappointed by his endings, but getting there always has been so great a pleasure that I take the chance that the next Furst novel I buy and read will have a great, a logical, an appropriate or a powerful finale. For those of his novels that disappoint me in the final pages I usually say to my wife, Rae, “This could have been a work of art with a better ending.”
THE SPIES OF WARSAW has a logical and appropriate ending. Furst, as usual, takes us on a fascinating journey full of twists and turns, cliffs, sex, betrayal, and love in telling us the story of a French Army officer assigned to his country’s embassy in Warsaw as a military attaché in the months leading up to the German invasion of Poland.
Col. Mercier, the protagonist of THE SPIES OF WARSAW, is a combat veteran of WWI, whose role through tempting a German businessman and through high-risk eyeballing of the Wehrmacht on secret maneuvers, is to uncover the hardware and tactics of the coming enemy’s war machine. Along the way, Mercier manages to arouse the personal animosity of a brutish SS officer, who unfortunately for him doesn’t realize the courage and toughness of the Frenchman he is intent on personally beating to death. That element adds a great deal of excitement to the novel. This is a book well worth buying and reading.
Furst is one of the finest writers I've read. Earlier I spoke of endings so let’s turn to beginnings. The opening chapter of his 1991 novel, DARK STAR, is a tapestry of description. I use the word tapestry to describe the richness of place and people he depicts.
I was propelled through both THE SPIES OF WARSAW and DARK STAR. The only disappointment came in the closing chapter of DARK STAR when Furst manipulates the reader unnecessarily and misses what might have been a perfect novel.
Furst’s novels, always set on the eve of WWII, are character and plot driven with the history of the era laced into the background and never allowed to dominate, never allowed to swallow the protagonist.
In DARK STAR, Szara, the protagonist, is a successful Pravda journalist who does some spying on the side. The novel unfolds in the context of the events leading up to WW II, the invasion of Poland, the attempts by anti-Stalinists to unseat him, and the budding conspiracy of German military aristocrats to assassinate Hitler.
Szara lives in fear of being killed by the Soviet intelligence apparatchiks. He undertakes a series of Soviet intelligence missions in which his associates are murdered on two occasions, but he escapes. He finds two women to fall in love with in Nazi Germany. He isn’t loyal to anyone but himself, selling Soviet intelligence to the British in return for enabling several hundred Jews to escape from Europe to Palestine. Although he isn’t religious, Szara has a sense of obligation to Jews— perhaps it is a racial or historical loyalty. When his fear is fulfilled—that Soviet intelligence apparently discovering his betrayal have marked him for death—he goes on the run, is captured by the Gestapo and is rescued by an anti-Hitler German aristocrat.
Despite my unhappiness with the ending, DARK STAR is another novel well worth buying and reading.

EVOLVING

2008-09-01T12:56:00.000-07:00

Twenty-three years after I wrote a novel called KINZUA, I began to rewrite it. The reason I was attempting to resurrect KINZUA was that in 1970, the book had gotten me an agent, who loved it and tried to sell it but failed. In addition, several of my colleagues at Newsday read it and said they couldn’t put it down. In retrospect, I can’t believe how low their standards were or how dishonest they were in giving me their assessments.
Any way, I reread KINZUA and was dismayed by how lousy a book it was.
The idea for KINZUA had come from the construction of the Kinzua Dam, which flooded a large part of a Seneca Indian reservation in northwestern Pennsylvania. The Seneca had the usual treaty with the United States, which promised that their people and their land would be undisturbed as long as the water flowed and the grass grew. And they were left alone for a couple of hundred years until powerful economic forces decided to seize a large piece of their reservation so it could be used for a combination of flood control, a power plant, and a huge lake for recreation.
KINZUA was a novel with mystical underpinnings in which a Seneca secret society conjures up a supernatural force that destroys the Kinzua Dam and in the process convinces the U.S. Government not to rebuild the dam.
In rewriting KINZUA into THE DREAM DANCER, I abandoned not only the characters and plot of the original novel, but eliminated references to the actual Kinzua Dam and the Seneca. Instead, I created an imaginary city, river and Native American band somewhere in Northwestern Pennsylvania, but kept the original concept of the federal government double-crossing a seemingly helpless handful of Native Americans called the Okwe.
Coop Rever, the protagonist of THE DREAM DANCER is chosen by the Great Spirit to carry out a deed that will save the Okwe land from being flooded by a dam and Okwe culture from being destroyed by a Congressman with a hidden agenda of revenge. Coop Rever, who had become a successful author and war correspondent, reluctantly becomes the Dream Dancer of the title at a great cost to himself: losing his wife and daughter and spending decades in a cruel prison for killing the Congressman and his family.
I consider THE DREAM DANCER my first fully realized novel. And, after many rereadings of the entire book and individual chapters, I have reached the immodest conclusion that it is a work of art. THE DREAM DANCER can be read on line at my website.

The next novel I will review is THE SPIES OF WARSAW by Alan Furst

MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM!

2008-08-11T09:24:00.000-07:00

MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM!
by Harry Harrison
Both Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM! and the 1973 film SOYLENT GREEN are predictors of the squalid future facing the people of Planet Earth through overpopulation, the exhaustion of natural resources, and pollution. The powerful film, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson in his terminal role, flows from the novel, yet the two works of art are the same and very different. Harrison is an effective writer and a master story teller although MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM! is flawed by an artificially-written diatribe against opponents of birth control delivered by Sol, a relatively minor character in the novel and a central figure in the film. Harrison could have offered the same information gracefully instead of so awkwardly. In both book and film wise old, exhausted and cynical Sol tells us how beautiful and abundant the earth once was. Harrison plays the role of writer as seer in forecasting that by 1999 the earth will be on the edge of exhaustion in its ability to support humankind. We have managed to make our way past 1999, but now scientists are predicting just as dismal a near future because of global warming. The underlying message of the novel, the film, and the warning of Al Gore and modern scientists is that we are eating ourselves: in the book: through unrestrained birth rates; in modern times: through unrestricted emissions of carbon dioxide from cars, planes, and power plants burning oil and coal products; and in the film: literally by turning human corpses into soylent green, a protein for the masses. I waited in vain for that distasteful food soylent green to be introduced in MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM! The soylent green—not in the novel-- turned out to be a contrivance of the script writer, used to hammer home that frightening prophecy of self destruction.

SLOGGING & PLEASURE IN READING and WRITING

2008-08-04T11:58:00.000-07:00

I was plodding through a novel about farm families living in an isolated mountainous area of North Carolina when I happened to see SOYLENT GREEN, the 1973 film that envisions an overpopulated, squalid Earth. That prompted me to read MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM! by Harry Harrison, the novel, which inspired the movie.
It is disappointing to put down a book after reading 100 pages or more, to decide that it is not worth going on that the process is a chore rather than a pleasure. I had been slogging through the farm-family novel waiting for lightning to strike, for the work to come alive. If I hadn’t picked up Harrison’s novel to read a few pages out of curiosity to see whether it was well written or just a potboiler, I might have soldiered on reading in unending detail about every aspect of the lives and labors of Nineteenth Century farmers. But Harrison caught me, the pleasure of sailing rather than slogging kept me reading his book to the end.
The word pleasure stuck up like a snow-capped mountain in my mind as I considered the two novels. Having experienced kidney stones and a couple of other awful agonies, I often said to my wife, Rae, that the absence of pain is pleasure. Googling pleasure, I immediately came across Epicurus, the Greek philosopher, and was shocked to discover he said the same thing over 2,000 years ago.
At any rate, the role of the writer is to deliver a pleasurable experience to the reader. Sometimes that thrill comes after I have forced my way up hill through some heavy words and sentences. And, sometimes I just can’t go on, the writer has failed me, has failed to provide a twist that interests or a view that inspires.

Next time, I will discuss Harry Harrison’s novel MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM! and SOYLENT GREEN, the film it inspired.

HANSELL’S DRAGON

2008-07-12T18:33:00.000-07:00

HANDSELL’S DRAGON
by Deborah K. Lauro

The protagonist of HANSELL’S DRAGON is a man who created misery for the occupants of a tiny penal colony of the future in the form of voracious, flying dragons, and subsequently is trying to assuage his guilt by doing good for one person at time.
Alex Collin, the protagonist is a biogeneticist who has lived for 174 years becoming over that time a wise, skilled physician serving outback communities whose residents respect and love him, but would tear him apart if they discovered he is the man who made the dragons who prey on them. The character created by Lauro is a decent guy with a hard edge; he is capable of crushing those who cross him and suffers from the loss of those he has loved over his long lifetime since they do die of old age while he goes on. And, Collin continues his biogenetic experiments secretly creating mammal bodies with computers for brains and souls.
At first I thought Lauro’s account suffered from too much dialogue, then at Chapter 16 (of a 40-chapter book) the quoted conversations slipped more into the background and the descriptions and character’s inner lives engagingly emerged. She is an effective writer and story teller; whenever the plot seemed ready to slow Lauro produced another interesting twist.
There is a love story: a young woman preparing to leave this planet she loves to spend the rest of her life on an austere space station because of her man. Her love is a fearful, suspicious, prejudiced (against computers), narrow-minded man, who doesn't seem worthy of her. Other self-centered and selfish men and women dance across the stage adding depth to the book, and so do blindly loyal robots limited only by their natures and programs.
The author takes us into a different world of exiled criminals, which reminds me of the early days of Australia where the British dumped all kinds of people they wanted to get rid of whether they committed real crimes or not, serious crimes or minor ones. And guess what? Most of the occupants of the free universe live in stark, artificial environments while the supposed criminals live in a beautiful, but dangerous natural world, blocked from access to any high-tech tools or weapons by their distant prison guards, who are watching them from space stations spinning around their planet.
I read this book in its free-online novel form, printing off three chapters at a time and continuing to be propelled by the characters through the story. I would recommend purchasing HANSELL’S DRAGON from an online source, where it is available, as a paperback or an ebook. The free online version that I read suffered from a distracting glitch with little squares replacing quote marks and apostrophes. Despite that I enjoyed reading Lauro’s novel.

MUSING ON MY MUSE

2008-07-06T12:29:00.000-07:00

I have always been fascinated by the creative process: how my muse sends scenes, lines, plots, and solution to elusive issues out of nowhere into my mind. These flashes of inspiration usually hit me as I am attempting to go to sleep and more usually as I walk each morning in the park where I exercise near my home. Sometimes, of course, I can be reading or watching television or a film when the muse speaks.
In 2004, I wrote a novel, THE ABSCONDER, based on an incident from my boyhood when three young men from Woodside in Queens, in the early 1950s killed a World War II veteran in the process of robbing him at gunpoint. Two of the robber/killers were electrocuted in Sing Sing. I knew the brother of one and the mother of the other, both lived within two blocks of my house. The third fellow, who escaped the chair, had always fascinated me. The rumor around the neighborhood was that he came from a wealthy family who hired a lawyer who got him off. In reality, a little research showed that the third killer was the son of a divorced waitress with no money at all. The judge decided to give him somewhat of a break by sending to prison for 20 years to life. He served 28 years before being paroled.
The third killer was the model for my protagonist in THE ABSCONDER. The difference was that my character was absolutely innocent of the robbery murder as were the other two characters who ended up being electrocuted. In THE ABSCONDER, the three were railroaded by police detectives pressured by intense publicity to wrap up the case.
My protagonist, who had graduated from a Jesuit high school just before his arrest and thus was a pretty smart kid, emerges from 28 years in prison as an accomplished poet. To quote my notes on the character: “He is 46 years old. Youth is behind him. He is into true middle age. Silent, private, fierce (not sullen), fleshless, walking time bomb. A man not to be messed with. A heavy drinker, smoker. In a brawl he would use his fists, head, feet, any blunt instrument or knife at hand. His eyes traveled across those he met, examining them, measuring them.”
To escape the burden of life-long parole with restrictions that make his life miserable and unfree, my protagonist absconds. Unfortunately for him, his parole officer who has retired assumes a role like Inspector Javert in Victor Hugo’s LES MISERABLE and relentlessly pursues the protagonist with the intention of bringing him to justice by returning him to prison.
The problem with the novel was that my protagonist had become too nice a guy, living too pleasant a life, and in each instance he was found by the parole officer, he managed to escape without doing anyone any harm. That character and plot problem gnawed at me. I was dissatisfied with THE ABSCONDER, but was unable to fix it. AND THEN.
And then, I was walking with my wife in the park near my home not thinking about THE ABSCONDER when the answers to the four-year-old problem poured into my mind. The muse had struck again. I immediately (or a least as soon as I got home) wrote down the solutions. In the near future, I will be doing another rewrite of THE ABSCONDER, which promises to be a much better book as a result.

The next novel I will review is HANSELL’S DRAGON by Deborah K. Lauro.

MOST IMPORTANT DAY OF THE YEAR

2008-06-26T11:15:00.000-07:00

June 26 is the most important day of the year.
Recognition of the significance of this date has come slowly, building each year from the first occurence when Kenneth C. Crowe II was born at Fort Meade, MD on June 26, 1957. On his birth certificate, his father's occupation was listed as soldier. His mother was a registered nurse.

TIMBUKTU

2008-06-02T08:45:00.000-07:00

TIMBUKTU
by Paul Auster (1999)

This is a short novel about a dog, Bones, and his master, Willy. Essentially this is a classic dog story about the loyalty, love and dependence of Bones on Willy, who is a bum, a misfit in American society, but who in turn loves Bones even though he doesn’t prepare him for their separation—when Willy dies. The book is simply written with no great efforts at description, yet it is funny and touching and clever. Bones in the end proves independent and courageous. Underlying it all is that Bones wants to go home to Willy. I couldn’t put the book down. It made me want to read more of Auster.

PATHFINDER APRIL HAMILTON

2008-05-31T21:56:00.000-07:00

Thanks to April Hamilton who has emerged as the pathfinder for indie authors trying to get their books up for sale on Amazon, CreateSpace, Kindle and Smashwords, I managed to upload my latest novel, THE JYNX, onto those sites over the past couple of weeks.
Anyone willing to shell out many hundreds and perhaps thousands of dollars can find e-publishers willing to take them through the process. April tells you how to do it yourself in a series of free guides on her website at http://www.aprillhamilton.com/. I can tell you from personal experience that April is the guide who can lead you through the maze to self-publishing and hopefully sales on the internet. And to make the way forward even easier, April has put all of the ins and outs of do-it-yourself publishing into a new book, THE INDIE AUTHOR GUIDE, currently available on CreateSpace and soon to be up on Amazon.
I’ve had two nonfiction books released through major publishers, but my dream always has been to see one of my novels in print. That seemed unlikely since my agent of many years couldn’t find a traditional publisher willing to buy my novels, even though she tried hard. Finally she told me all good things must come to an end and unceremoniously dumped me. And I have been unable to find an agent to replace her.
I figured my novels would go unread except by my wife, Rae, and the few friends, all writers with books and films to their credit, who did me the favor of reading them.
Then, as birthday gift last August, my grandson, Reeves, offered to put my novel, THE DREAM DANCER, online. My first reaction was reluctance. I didn’t want to fall into the world of vanity publishing. But realizing in offering THE DREAM DANCER as a free online novel, I wasn’t paying anyone to stroke me. I wondered whether I would draw any reasders from the world-wide ocean of the web. So far I have had 64,104 hits from Aug. 19, 2007 to May 30, 2008, and have averaged the transfer of the equivalent of one and a half copies of the novel per day. I have no idea how many of those hitters were actual readers—although one sent me an e-mail saying: “I read this book in 24-48 hours. I had to know what happened. A few parts were difficult to read, especially when he (the protagonist) was in jail…I loved the book.”
Last fall, I entered my novel, THE JYNX, in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. I made it to the first round of semi-finals, but obviously I didn’t win. What the contest did for me was to draw further into e-publishing. Amazon offered the semi-finalists a chance to publish and sell their books online through CreateSpace. With the help of April Hamilton’s free guides on her website, I managed to offer THE JYNX for sale via CreateSpace, Amazon, Kindle, and Smashwords.
There are no statistics, known to me, available on average internet sales of self-published novels. My research revealed that the average sales of print-on-demand books to be 75 copies, most of them purchased by the author and his family. So with that as a measure, I will consider the sale of THE JYNX to be a success at 75 copies sold to people other than myself. If sales reach 500 I will be delighted and at 1,000, I would be ecstatic. Watch this blog for reports on whether THE JYNX attracts that many buyers.

The next novel I will review in coming days is TIMBUKTU by Paul Auster (1999).

A HALF LIFE OF ONE

2008-05-06T10:08:00.000-07:00

A HALF-LIFE OF ONE
by Bill Liversidge

The highest compliment one can pay to a novelist is to buy the book. I first read Bill Liversidge’s A HALF LIFE OF ONE by printing off his free online version finding it through Jennifer Armstrong’s Free Online Novels website (http://www.free-online-novels.com/). I was so taken with the novel that I wanted to pass it along to my son, Roy, a voracious reader—so I paid a super compliment to Bill Liversidge by buying A HALF LIFE OF ONE via the UK Amazon.com, paying the price of buying a book overseas with diminished U.S. dollars and paying the airfreight with that same diminished currency, but the book is worth the cost.
My review of A HALF LIFE OF ONE:
This is the story of a businessman, Nick Dowdy, who is a failure in everything he does because he reaches beyond his capabilities. His business fails, his marriage is on the edge of failure, his relationship with his son is awful. As we move through the novel, we find how self-centered, how selfish and how ruthless Nick Dowdy is. The writing moves right along, the story has twists and turns that keep it very interesting, I found myself wondering what would come next and covering up the bottom of pages so I would not leap ahead of the course of my reading.
Nick Dowdy is a man with all kinds of schemes to get out of the predicament of the failure of his business. He is not willing to take a menial job. He thinks of himself as something special. Even he recognizes that his schemes are ridiculous and unworkable until he moves ahead in desperation to carry out the kidnapping of a successful woman entrepreneur. He isn’t what he seems. She isn’t what she seems. She doesn’t have as much money as he assumes. In the process of kidnapping her, he kills a fishing guide. This novel takes place in Scotland. And like so many kidnappers he finds his victim is more of a burden than he ever imagined. You know he is going to be caught. Just when he is on the edge of taking the step towards demanding the ransom, which certainly would lead the police to him, his house is saved by his wife from creditors and a job he has applied for opens up.
The ending is another version of the Edgar Allan Poe’s THE CAST OF MONTILADDO. Dowdy leaves his victim to die an awful lonely death in the darkness of an unheated shack, filled with rats in the bridge between winter and spring. The cruelty of this act by a man who considers himself a decent guy is astonishing and draining. In the end you see through Dowdy’s thoughts how little he thinks of his son and how willing he is to cheat on his wife and how he justifies the murder of two people, the fishing guide and the woman entrepreneur, and how he reveals his guilt in contributing in a small way to his father’s death, and his happiness in seeing his mother, who was a mental patient, die.
This was a well-written, smoothly moving, stinging portrait of a seeming everyman, who is decent and willing to work hard, but within himself lurks a self-centered selfishness that enables him to be startlingly cruel. At the same time, there is an element of guilt and the fear of being caught that is his sentence to a torturous life.
(Note: You can find out a lot more about novelist Bill Liversidge at his blog, View from the Pundy House at http://www.pundyhouse.blogspot.com/).

ANOTHER BEGINNING

2008-05-01T09:34:00.000-07:00

Starting today with this blog, Novelist Online Onpaper, I will offer my thoughts on writing, reading and publishing at the very least on the first of each month and more often by whim.
Periodically, I will review novels from the present and the past, published online or on paper. Hopefully, I won't rain on any novelist, especially those seeking their audience without the help of traditional publishers.
The first novel I will review in the next couple of days is Bill Liversidge's A HALF LIFE OF ONE.
I hope you will return to see how I perform, to enjoy what I write, and to offer comments.