Mooney

Mooney is the warm and homey biography of an amazing individual who earned the title “World Master Carver.”  Undoubtedly a genius and savant, Ernest “Mooney” Warther had the strange gift of being able to visualize, in sequence and in advance, the thousands of cuts required carve his famous tree of 511 pairs of wooden pliers of diminishing size.  That someone even conceived of a pliers tree is mindboggling enough.  Mooney spent close to sixty years carving mainly models of steam locomotives in the small Ohio town of Dover where he played the role of local hero to generations.

I was especially anxious to read the story of Mooney Warther as it was my luck to have met him at his original museum when I was a boy, and naturally, he carved for me his famous wooden pliers which I regretfully lost somewhere on my long strange trip.  A few years ago, while driving through Ohio, I made a point of visiting his current museum and found the experience even more transporting as an adult.  This review, however, is not about me; it is about Mooney by John P. Hayes, PHD, which I found charming and informative.  Mooney is the story of an incredible life.  Read it and you may want to go to Dover.

Price $2.99

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The Long Painful Slog Into Print

Due to some vagary of the CreateSpace gods, The Hundred Years Farce outpaced Family Traits to POD availability.  This uncanny little tale reveals how things might have been if, after conquering Mexico in 1846, the United States had taken a look around and decided to stay.  It drips with political satire jabs at issues more relevant than ever.

195 pages

CreatSpace

Still available in all eBook formats at Smashwords and Amazon

Relentless Adventure

Meet Alain de Noux, hero of the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812, decorated US Navy Captain, witness of Trafalgar, innovative ship designer and builder, privateer and seducer of women—a highly versatile young man.  Alain had to pad his age by three years to get into the Navy, and what he accomplishes before attaining his true age of twenty-five, defies belief in naval circles to the extent that the Royal Navy claimed their ships were lost in storms rather than admit that one man could inflict such damage.  USS Relentless has some of the best sea battle scenes you will ever read, and plenty of them.  A bevy of occasionally wanton females in various states of undress and numerous sojourns in exotic locales keeps the tale juicy.  O’Neil de Noux, who is not really a descendant of Alain, shows an expert familiarity with all things nautical in the early nineteenth century.  He puts the reader on that ship and takes him along for the cruise.  This is a great story as well as a history lesson.

Now, there may be two schools of thought about USS Relentless: rich with detail, versus slowed by excessive description.  My personal preference is a breakneck pace which is exactly what we get in the action scenes, however, after the smoke clears, I found a bit more detail than I thought necessary to advance the story.  This however, did not lessen my enjoyment of the book, especially when the descriptiveness was hovering over the heroine’s nipples.

234,000 words
eBook price: $4.99

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Due to some formatting glitches, this book is temporarily unpublished at Smashwords.