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.

In the Blood Live at Createspace

Now Available in Paperback at CreateSpace

Who was George Washington Skipper?

 He was a twice-wounded Confederate veteran who loved the ladies a little too much. He kept moving to stay ahead of his wives and the whipping post until Reconstruction and personal tragedy ran him to ground deep in the woods of South Carolina
with the wrong woman.

Coming soon to CreateSpace

 

End of the Long Dark Journey

How hard could it be to format a book for print on demand?  Pretty damned hard!  Make one false move and Word sticks in a blank page, then all your chapters start on left page instead the right.  And page numbers...  Why should page numbers be complicated?  Well, they are!  eBooks are a breeze.

After an infinite amount of headbanging, swearing and re-uploading, 

Face of the Angel

Is available in print

The story of what Dr. Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz Angel of Death, did for forty years while hiding in plain sight in South America.  Read how the legions of Nazi hunters fell all over themselves while Mengele tended his flower garden and continued his malignant research.

Coming soon, if I survive the process...

 

In paperback

Did I Say This?

I'm not sure that Mark Nesbitt wants to be compared to me or even mentioned in the same sentence, but I found it fascinating to compare another take on the theme of how could the Confederacy have won the Civil War and the ramifications for future developments.

If the South won Gettysburg

is a fascinating tale in three parts.  It begins as a meticulous retelling of the beginning of the battle then turns into a highly plausible description of how events might have developed had Lee listened to Longstreet’s suggestion of a flanking maneuver.  The resulting invented troop movements and skirmishes read like truth.  The outcome as told by Mark Nesbitt appears to be precisely how things would have been if one decision by Lee were taken differently.

The third part of the story is a rapid narration of subsequent worldwide reaction to a Confederate victory.  All speculation feels reasonable and logical.  This is the type of cerebral exercise that history enthusiasts will find intriguing and amusing.  Plus, there is a message that twenty-first century readers would be remiss to ignore.

41,390 Words

Price $3.99

Buy at Smashwords 

Buy at Amazon

Entering the Brave New World

For those of you who have been hovering your mouse over those “Buy Now” buttons back at www.ScottSkipper.com while grumbling, “This joker isn’t worth investing in an eReader,” vacillate no more.  Soon you will be able to navigate to the Createspace Store, click a button and an agent of the United States government will deliver Face of the Angel  in hard copy to a mailbox near you.  That is, if you reside in the US.  Outside the domain of the US Postal Service it may be the Mossad that brings it to you.  We’ll have to see.

I hope that everyone appreciates the sacrifice that I am making in this endeavor.  Formatting a book for print is a lot tougher than formatting an eBook.  The Createspace software and I have been jousting for many days but I am confident that the end is in sight.  Soon trees will fall to surrender their pulp for these venerable pages.  Well, there is still the ‘Proof a Physical Copy’ stage, so standby, but don’t hold your breath.

Doctor Josef Mengele selected thousands for the gas chambers on the platform of the train station at the Auschwitz death camp.  The survivors called him the Angel of Death.  He was brilliant, urbane and charming, and he performed vivisection on the prisoners he spared from the Zyklon B.  Then he spent forty years being hunted.

Although at one time he was in the hands of the U. S. Army, Mengele was never charged with war crimes.  He moved about with the help of dozens of people, sometime unwittingly, though often knowing full well who he was.  He evaded scores of professional Nazi hunters and spies for forty years even though his wife's name was in the Buenos Aires phone book.  The stories told about him by the Simon Wiesenthal and the other pursuers grew in proportion to the years that they searched for him as did his fear and sense of isolation as well as the price on his head.

Still available as an eBook from your favorite retailers via:www.ScottSkipper.com