Angels in the Darkness

I use Grammarly's plagarism checker because I only want to steal from the best

Angels in the Darkness is a stunning achievement resulting from felicitous access to remarkable primary source material.  This is the memoir of a woman who was ten years old in 1939 and living in Berlin.  The Bolle family was wealthy, well-known and respected, living in the prestigious suburb of Dahlem from whence Jewish families began to flee after the Kristallnacht, and into those derelict houses first came high-ranking Nazis, and later American officers.  Jutta Bolle went to school with Himmler’s daughter and Field Marshall Keitel lived around the corner!

The insight Jutta shares about the family’s fear of the Nazis, the terror of the bombing and the arrival of the Russians is both warm and chilling.  Her voice is real and carries the reader right into the events that she witnessed with her description of daily life in wartime Germany.  She is both engaging and appealing, and her narrative strips bare many popularly held ideas of this formative period of human disaster.  Lisa Farringer Parker’s masterpiece will engross history buffs, war story aficionados, and human-interest fans equally.  It’s an unforgettable read!

254720 words (rather long but never slow)
$9.99 (a little pricy but you won't regret it)

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Period Piece Racism

Yes I Can is, first, the story of a remarkable entertainer as told to his close friends, Jane and Burt Boyar, in the 1960’s.  It is also a frank, painful and intimate exposé of racism as it existed during the lifetime of Sammy Davis, Jr. as well as an insider’s look at the day-to-day lives of the brightest luminaries in show business.

The twenty-first century reader who is sufficiently padded with years will recall with dismay the days of institutionalized segregation.  Although it has diminished, racism has by no means vanished and it may well be resurging in our society that is increasingly diverse and polarized.  Sammy Davis speaks personally and honestly of the racial attacks coming at him from both white and black societies, beginning with his childhood in Harlem through the Civil Rights era when he was one of the most loved and highest paid entertainers in the world.

Burt Boyar’s uncanny excellence as a writer leaves one marveling at how any author is able to capture such depth of emotion using another man’s voice.  Yes I Can is told as much in Sammy Davis’ hip lingo of the Jazz Era as in his extremely articulate English that belies his total lack of formal education.  This is a fast-paced story that takes no prisoners and challenges the reader to keep up as the pages fly and insights unfold into the life of a performer without equal.

239790 Words
Price $4.99

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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