Nonfiction Books
AMERICA’S GREATEST GOLF COURSES
This book features 52 of the greatest golf courses in North America with 110,000 words, large photographs, and complete listings and reference data in the appendices. It sold through five printings for the Gallery imprint at W.H. Smith. It was conceived, written, edited, designed and partially photographed by the author, with editorial support by Matthew Lands.
Excerpt:
Golf is impossible to trace to a moment of inception. That’s because there never was a moment. Golf evolved, and in citing the origin of that evolution we may engage in speculation or rely on documented accounts. The problem with speculation is that legends and myths abound. The trouble with documentation is that written histories are typically in service of the political interests in power, viz., propaganda.
The earliest documented evidence of golf is in the Brussels city records office in Belgium.
EVERYTHING YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE YOU PLAY GOLF
The market niche for this book replenishes annually. And the niche is seven million wide. This is the only book targeted at this niche. Other golf books are for people who already play golf, not to say that those people can’t learn from this book as well. It has 116,000 words and 26 illustrations.
Excerpt:
IMAGINE LEARNING TO SKI with 200cm boards and competition bindings on a double black diamond run. Would you advise any person wanting to learn to use a computer for the first time to begin with a Linux operating system? Golf is no exception to the rule that you must learn to walk before you run. The very nature of wielding a long stick to strike a tiny ball accurately, with a desired trajectory and distance control, presents a unique set of challenges that are best assimilated gradually. What makes golf noticeably different from other sports is the fact that at impact you are…
Fiction Books
ALMOST PRESIDENT
A skeleton or two is one thing. But, African-American GOP Presidential front-runner, Senator Herndon Hamilton, has a closet that could bring down the CIA.
When his staff arranges a detour from the campaign trail, Hern’s Vietnam CIA past returns unexpectedly.
A blackmail demand threatens to reveal an illegitimate Vietnamese daughter Hern doesn’t know about. Additional demands threaten to reveal Hern’s wartime use of torture, hypnosis, and psychotropic pharmaceuticals to interrogate Viet Cong sympathizers.
Somehow, the blackmailer even found out about the CIA morgue at Bien Hoa, and the KIA body parts sold to black-market surgeons in Asia and Europe during the early seventies. But, how the blackmailer found out about the assassination of U.S. POWs is mind boggling.
SHE WOULDN’T SAY
SHE WOULDN’T SAY is an autobiographical novel about choosing Vietnam over jail or Sweden in order to appease a pleading wife, then getting divorce papers a month later in Saigon. This irreverent account of life on the streets of Saigon begins where MASH and GOOD MORNING VIETNAM could never have gone; staying high, dining in French restaurants and dealing on the black market.
Excerpt:
A warm June afternoon in Dayton, Ohio would have made Wright Patterson Air Force Base a pleasant place to catch a flight in 1969, had Lisa been there. Going to Sweden seemed to me like an adventure, but Lisa didn’t see it that way. All Lisa could see was me going to Vietnam.
I forced a coin into a pay phone and covered one ear against jet noise.
FLOOD STAGE
FLOOD STAGE is a short novel set against unreported but historically accurate World War II life on the edge of the Tunisian Sahara.
Pilot Nick Gordon was destined for the Pacific to avenge Pearl Harbor when he wound up on a clandestine mission in North Africa. Wounded and flying blind, he strays out over the Mediterranean and bails out onto a coastal island dominated by a heartless Nazi colonel.
Nick rescues a French girl from a rape, winds up in jail, and the girl helps him escape. Together they stay a step ahead of the Nazis and discover that Nick has false treason charges facing him. They steal a plane, crash in the desert, join a Bedouin caravan, share a truck with Albert Camus, and arrive by ship in Louisiana.
The girl had stowed away and the real trouble begins when they arrive in San Antonio and Nick learns that his waiting wife is pregnant.