Books

Online bookstores:   Amazon.com Barnes & Noble Borders Books@Random Powell's Books AbeBooks.com A1Books Books-A-Million.com BookCloseOuts.com Books Now BookZone Bookpool.com

Favorite authors Fiction Non-Fiction

Favorite authors

Mystery, crime, & suspense fiction     Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child, Patricia Cornwell, Allan Folsom, Dan Brown, Michael Connelly, Faye Kellerman, Leslie Glass, Stephen Frey   Legal thrillers     Robert K. Tanenbaum, Brad Meltzer, Scott Turow, Linda Fairstein, John Grisham, David Rosenfelt   Medical thrillers     Michael Palmer, Peter Clement, Tess Gerritsen, Robin Cook, Leonard Goldberg   General fiction     Michael Crichton, Pat Conroy, Ken Follett, Jeffrey Archer, Tom Wolfe   Non-fiction     David Halberstam, Vincent Bugliosi1, Bob Greene, Jon Krakauer, Tom Wolfe   Humor     Woody Allen, Dave Barry

Here are some of the books I have enjoyed over the years, grouped by Fiction and Non-Fiction.

Fiction

   The Patient – Michael Palmer

An international assassin has a brain tumor, and with a small band of cohorts he impersonates someone else to make arrangements for his needed surgery, ultimately taking over the surgical wing of a hospital in Boston. The protagonist in this thriller is the neurosurgeon who must perform the operation, and she must use her wits to comply with this maniac and also care for her other patients. Along the way she becomes romantically involved with the CIA operative who has been hunting the terrorist for five years. As you would expect, there is much tension in the story resulting from terrorists' actions, and Palmer's description of the step-by-step process of the brain surgery using a robot device is also very exciting. Palmer is one of my favorite authors and I've read and really enjoyed all of his books.

   Critical Condition – Peter Clement

The central character in this thriller suffers a brain hemorrhage which leaves her paralyzed and just barely alive. As she lies in the hospital she cannot move a single muscle except her eyelids, and she is aware of everything that goes on around her, including some secret and illegal activities that may ultimately harm her. She and her male companion, a doctor, contrive a communication system using blinks of her eyes, and she tries to tell him about what she has witnessed. This exciting story involves conspiracies and murders.

   The Bone Collector – Jeffery Deaver

This book introduces the crime-solving team of Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs, who appear in several subsequent Deaver novels. An interesting character twist is that Rhyme, the former head of NYPD forensics, is a quadraplegic from an accident who is confined to a bed, and Sachs communicates with him over a headset when she is investigating a crime scene. In this story they are trying to stop a New York City serial killer who leaves clues pointing to his next victim. It is fascinating how Deaver's criminalists examine trace evidence from the crime scene to determine a serial killer's next move.

   Dead Even – Brad Meltzer

A married couple opposes each other in court, she as the prosecuting attorney and he as the defense attorney for the client. This may be a conflict of interest but neither can drop the case because each has secretly been threatened. They must not only stay on the case but win it, or the other's life will be in jeopardy. This concealment creates a lot of stress in the couple's relationship, and to compound this, both already feel insecure in their professional lives. Like all good thrillers, this story leads up to an exciting conclusion.

   The Karp & Ciampi Legal Thrillers – Robert K. Tanenbaum

There are over a dozen books in this series featuring New York Assistant District Attorney Butch Karp and his pistol-packing lawyer wife Marlene Ciampi. The first book begins when they are both A.D.A.'s and their courtship has not even started, and the series continues chronologically as their relationship evolves and their family grows. Marlene becomes independently wealthy from Internet stocks and her career path changes several times throughout the books including running a security agency that provides protection for abused and stalked women and starting a guard dog business. An integral character in many of the stories is their brilliant, complex, spiritual, teenage daughter Lucy, a prodigy who speaks dozens of languages fluently. If I were to single out one book that provided many memorable thrills it would be Act of Revenge, in which Lucy witnesses a murder and is kidnapped. Each book stands alone as a complete story, but since the main characters repeat and develop throughout all the books, the entire series is like one epic novel. Tanenbaum is an attorney who at one time served as a New York A.D.A. himself, and he gives great descriptions of life in New York City.

   Presumed Innocent – Scott Turow

I loved the fascinating characters in this courtroom drama, presented through the eyes of the defendant, a deputy prosecuting attorney being tried for the murder of a colleague. Turow, a lawyer himself, obviously knows the details of how a case is brought to trial, from the police investigations to the meetings with the lawyers, and how personalities can influence the outcome. Like all good mysteries, this one has plot twists and red herrings.

   Abduction – Robin Cook

This is not the typical Robin Cook thriller, where the story is usually centered around a realistic sounding medical issue. Abduction is more social in it's plot and it's actually a science fiction novel. The action takes off when a minisub and some divers encounter what appears to be an active underwater volcano and from that point on they find themselves in way over their heads so to speak. Be prepared for some startling and profound concepts when you read this book. I've read and enjoyed all Cook's novels.
 

   The Day After Tomorrow – Allan Folsom

This action-packed thriller spans decades and continents, following an American surgeon as he tries to solve the murder of his father that occurred when he was a child. Besides murder, global intrigue, and terror, the story contains science twists and love interests. Read some reviews.

   A Man in Full – Tom Wolfe   (I also review Wolfe under Non-Fiction)

Wolfe's charm and humor make this book hard to put down. Every page seems to contain at least one gem of his wit that you want to write down and quote. I've read almost all of Wolfe's books, beginning with his first, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. For years he was known primarily as a writer of non-fiction, including regular essays in The New Yorker. This book, and his great novel about culture clashes in New York, The Bonfire of the Vanities, show that he is also a master of fiction.

   Beach Music – Pat Conroy

The story of a contemporary man my age and his young daughter trying to deal with life after the suicide of his wife. It explores the rich family dynamics of his and his childhood friends' families. The setting is primarily Rome and South Carolina, and through dark, anguished narratives goes back to the incredible horrors of the Holocaust. The account of the Vietnam War protests brought back memories of my experiences in that era that shaped my life. Conroy is one of the best.
 

   Harvest – Tess Gerritsen

Set in Boston, this medical thriller explores the ethical edges of organ transplants. Gerritsen is a former MD so she knows her subject well. I love all her novels (Gravity, what a thriller!), and as I mentioned above, I'm also a fan of Robin Cook, another doctor who became an author.
 

   The Third Twin – Ken Follett

The story begins when a man discovers that he has an identical twin brother who is an evil murderer, and he worries that he has the same genes. I love the way Follett gets into to the minds of his characters, including one character's in the moments before his death. (Read Ken's view.)

   Rising Sun – Michael Crichton

High Tech fiction; my favorite kind. I like most of Crichton's books, which are usually based on believable sounding science. I found his book about nanoparticles gone wild, Prey, hard to put down. I also enjoyed Travels, an autobiographical book of episodes in Crichton's life.
 

   Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein

I read a lot of Science Fiction in the early 1970s. Although Heinlein was not my favorite Sci-Fi author (sometimes I found him a little old-fashioned and sexist) this story of an extra-terrestrial earthling who becomes a cult leader on Earth is quite profound. Can you grok it?

Non-Fiction

   A Long Way Gone - Memorirs of a Boy Soldier – Ishmael Beah   (good interview videos on this link)

This first person account of a boy's adventures in Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s is very gripping. When he was 12 years old Ishmael's village was raided by rebels and he fled with other children, enduring "months of traveling, sleeping in the bush, and having to eat and drink what the forest provided." Eventually these children were recruited into the army where they fought many battles and participated in the war's atrocities. After several years he was entered into a rehabilitation program, ultimately coming to the U.S. and finishing high school in Manhattan and getting a B.A. in political science at Oberlin College in Ohio. Now he speaks at the United Nations, Unicef, and other places to raise awareness of the continual and rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world. I highly recommend this book. I saw Ishmael speak and he autographed my book!
 

   The R.Crumb Handbook – R.Crumb and Peter Poplaski

In the sixties I was a big fan of cartoonist Robert Crumb's Zap Comix and his characters Mr. Natural, Flakey Foont, Fritz the Cat, Devil Girl and the Keep on Truckin' guy, so I was really thrilled when I received this autobiography of Crumb as a present from my wife. In The R.Crumb Handbook Crumb tells about creating homemade FOO comics as a child with his brother Charles. There are a lot of photographs and his illustrations in the book. In one chapter he says something that I think sums up his philosophy quite well. Crumb says, "As a person I was weak and helpless in the real world. It's a jungle out there! But, since I'd rather be dead than mediocre, my motto is: Every Drawing a Masterpiece!"
 

   State of War – James Risen1

This book gives a behind the scenes look at the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Some of the points Risen makes are:

• The Bush administration ignores or suppresses intelligence information that does not support its views
• There was no pre-war or post-war plan for the Iraq war.
  - The CIA had no presence in Iraq before war began
  - The Pentagon is against post-war nation-building
• The heroin trade was allowed to grow to outrageous levels in Afghanistan because the US was afraid of inciting anti-American violence if they attacked the drug lords
• Rumsfeld, not Bush, has the last word in foreign policy
  

In November 2003, after the initial US invasion that had toppled Sadam's regime had quieted down, as the Iraqi insurgents were starting to become more active an army officer said to the CIA station chief in Baghdad, "The war is about to begin." The violence has continued and Risen says it has begun to look like "we are in danger of losing a war we thought we had already won."
 

   Eats, Shoots & Leaves – Lynne Truss

This book is a punctuation lover's (or stickler's) delight. One of the most prominently misunderstood and misused characters in the English language is the apostrophe, and the book has many examples of its questionable use (eg, should that be its or it's?), a common misuse being writing "CD's" and "1990's" instead of "CDs" and "1990s". Truss points out that text messaging has really caused punctuation rules to be ignored, and it will be interesting to see what influence this freewheeling style will have on regular writing. Some may find these rules too rigid, but if you think of punctuation in the way Truss describes it, as "a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling," you can appreciate its power and usefulness. Truss is charming and witty, and I caught myself laughing out loud many times as I read this book.
 

   Seabiscuit – Laura Hillenbrand

This is the story of one of the greatest thoroughbred racehorses in history. With smallish stature, knobby knees, and slightly crooked forelegs, Seabiscuit was the most unlikely of champions, but the team of owner Charles Howard, trainer Tom Smith, and jockeys Red Pollard & George Woolf brought out his natural competitive instincts and winning ways. I was fascinated to read about the intrigue of the racetracks, the tough and dangerous lives of the jockeys, and especially the play-by-play action of specific races, like the match race between Seabiscuit and Triple-Crown winner War Admiral. Hillenbrand details a world I knew very little about before reading this book. I learned of the importance of the relationship between the jockey and the horse, and that a horse race involves strategies that start way before the actual race and continue to develop right up until the horses cross the finish line, and that a race horse might need stablemates who provide a calming influence, in Seabiscuit's case an old horse named Pumpkin, a dog, and a spiker-monkey. The book was made into a movie in 2003.
 

   Catch Me If You Can – Frank W. Abagnale1, with Stan Redding

This is the thrilling autobiography of one of the most incredible con men in modern history. Frank Abagnale details his notorious escapades which he carried out for five years in the 1960s in all 50 states and 26 countries until he was finally caught and imprisoned. I remember hearing about several of his capers (putting his account number on the deposit slips in the bank lobby, and the "OUT  OF ORDER" sign on the night depository) but I didn't realize they were the work of the same individual. His primary scam was cashing fraudulent checks ("paperhanging") by which he acquired $2.5 million. He was also very successful at his impersonations of an airline pilot (for years he rode for free in the cockpit of airliners as an off-duty copilot), a doctor (he administrated the pediatric unit of an Atlanta hospital for a year), a lawyer (this high school dropout actually passed the Louisiana bar exam to work as a prosecutor in the state Attorney General's office), and a college professor (he taught a summer course in sociology at BYU). This fascinating book was made into a movie in 2002. Ironically (or perhaps logically) Frank now heads up a firm, Abagnale & Associates, that specializes in fraud prevention.
 

   Divided We Stand – Eric Darton

This erudite biography of the World Trade Center in New York includes a history of the Port Authority, who built the WTC. It is a fascinating account of the battles between the development side (the Port Authority, David and Nelson Rockefeller) and the existing merchants who would be displaced. Darton is a native New Yorker who witnessed this entire decades-long episode in the history of the development of Lower Manhattan. Ironically, though this book came out in 1999, the title and battleground theme of the cover makes it look like a story about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
 

   Miles: The Autobiography - Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe1

Miles always marched to his own beat in contemporary music, and he was always inspired by new and younger musicians. His music continuously evolved, so his response to people asking him to play something he had recorded years before was "I tell them to go buy the record. I'm not there in that place any longer and I have to live for what is best for me and not what's best for them." He reveals a lot of fascinating details about the recording sessions and tours he did over the years, and the musicians he played with. Miles had a public persona, so it is interesting to hear about his private life from his perspective. Miles' language is a little rough at times, but out of respect Troupe chooses to leave his words uncensored, like his music.
 

   Ball Four – Jim Bouton

When this hilarious baseball tell-all came out in 1970 it was ripped apart by the baseball establishment with cries that it was all lies. Bouton, who pitched for the Yankees and several other teams in his career from 1962-1978, writes about life in the locker rooms, dugouts, and bullpens that is not seen by the fans. His wit is very sharp and I laughed continuously while reading it. Bouton's honesty helps take some of the players off their pedestals and shows us that they are just human beings, with the same insecurities as the rest of us, and engaged in some of the same crazy activities. Besides his sense of humor, I admire Bouton for his beliefs. For more about the book and Bouton, check out "Ball Four by Jim Bouton".
 

   Into Thin Air – Jon Krakauer

In May, 1996, more than a dozen expeditions climbed to the summit of Mt. Everest where 12 climbers were killed in a blinding blizzard. Krakauer was one of the survivors and he tells the story in sobering detail. I found this book very difficult to put down. Another best-seller by the author is Into the Wild.
 

   Prozac Nation – Elizabeth Wurtzel

In spite of her severe clinical depression (and with the help of psychopharmacology), Wurtzel is articulate and witty, and I find her book strangely charming. She was criticized by some reviewers for being overly self-indulgent, but this is her autobiography and I think it should be told that way. Of the external influences on her life she says, "I was like an already overspiced stew, and all the chefs adding all their condiments were only making it more foggy and muddled and bad." With one Catholic parent and one Jewish parent, Wurtzel says, ". . . the difference between Catholic guilt and Jewish guilt is that the former emanates from the knowledge that we are all born already fallen, that there is nothing we can ever do to overcome the original sin; the latter springs from a sense that everyone of us was created from God's image and has the potential for perfection. So Catholic guilt is about impossibility and Jewish guilt is about an abundance of possibility." The theme of this book is reminiscent of I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can by Barbara Gordon.
 

   Outrage – Vincent Bugliosi1

Subtitled "The Five Reasons Why O.J.Simpson Got Away With Murder". Bugliosi is disgusted with the way the L.A. prosecutors handled the Simpson case. If he hadn't used Outrage as the title of this book it would have been a good title for None Dare Call  It Treason, his scathing article in The Nation about the U.S. Supreme Court decision that gave George W. Bush the 2000 presidential election. He used The Nation article as the basis for a book, The Betrayal of America. Bugliosi was the prosecutor of Charles Manson, and his book about that case, Helter Skelter, was a best-seller.
 

   Liar's Poker – Michael Lewis

The first in a series of books I read several years ago about incidents in the financial world. While I'm not a big follower of the stock market, there have been some very interesting Wall Street stories. Other books I enjoyed include The Predators' Ball by Connie Bruck, Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough & John Helyar, Inside Job by Stephen Pizzo, Mary Fricker, & Paul Muolo, Sudden Death by Mark Stevens.
 

   Be True to Your School – Bob Greene  (I still like his writing in spite of his troubles)

Bob Greene grew up in Ohio and became a writer and journalist (Chicago Tribune). This is the first book of several I've read by him and it really grabbed me because it was a biography of his life during his high school years in the 60s (my era). One of his more recent books is Hang Time, about Michael Jordan.
 

   Second Wind – Bill Russell

I love sports biographies, especially autobiographies. Bill Russell's memoirs are thoroughly enjoyable. It's remarkable to hear him describe how he developed his defensive style by replaying in his head the game he had just played. Being left-handed, Russell mentally practiced mirroring the moves of a right-handed player and learned to block shots.
 

   The Reckoning – David Halberstam

This book traces the histories of Ford and Toyota, the number 2 auto makers in the USA and Japan at the time he wrote it (1986). Halberstam is one of my favorite authors and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Vietnam War for The New York Times.

   Insanely Great – Steven Levy

This is the story of the Macintosh computer. I found it particularly amusing when I read how Steve Jobs and others from Apple were inspired by a visit to the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) labs in 1979. PARC is the place where many of the things we take for granted in the computer world were developed, like the mouse, pop-up windows, many word-processing features (including Copy, Cut, Paste, Undo), and using bit-mapping for screen graphics. Levy is a regular contributor of technical articles to Newsweek and has written several other non-fiction books.
 

   Where Wizards Stay Up Late – Katie Hafner / Matthew Lyon

This book follows the development of the ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet. The book is filled with stories of incredibly intelligent people. You will learn how the @ symbol was put in the email address, hear some interesting early flaming stories, how the Ethernet came about, and read about the early debates over Net privacy and censorship in the message groups.
 

   The Cuckoo's Egg – Cliff Stoll1 (he has a skimpy website)

Stoll's first person account of monitoring hackers as they attempt to break into US military computers is as thrilling as fiction. Unfortunately, after writing such a great Internet-espionage thriller, Stoll has become disgruntled with cyberspace and the way computers have infiltrated America's schools.

Other books about hackers I've read include:

Takedown	(1996)  -	Tsutomu Shimomura (with John Markoff)
The Fugitive Game	(1997)  -	Jonathan Littman
Cyberpunk	(1995)  -	Katie Hafner and John Markoff
The Cyberthief and          the Samurai	(1996)  -	Jeff Goodell
The Hacker Crackdown	(1994)  -	Bruce Sterling
Masters of Deception	(1999)  -	Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner
Hackers	(1994)  -	Steven Levy

   The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe   (I also review Wolfe under Fiction)

A definitive documentation of the hedonism of the hippie generation, Wolfe's 1968 book follows the psychedelic exploits of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and their cross-country journey in a wildly painted school bus. Reading this book had a tremendous influence on my lifestyle in the late 60s.