June 2005

“Noe says, —I must build a boat.
—A boat, she says.
—A ship, more like. I'll need the boys to help, he adds as an afterthought. —We're leagues from the sea, she says, or any river big enough to warrant a boat. This conversation is making Noe impatient. —I've no need to explain myself to you. —And when you're done, she says carefully, we'll be taking this ship to the sea somehow?
As usual, Noe's impatience fades quickly. —We'll not be going to the sea. The sea will be coming to us.”

In this brilliant debut novel, Noah's family (or Noe as he's called here)—his wife, sons, and daughters-in-law-tell what it's like to live with a man touched by God, while struggling against events that cannot be controlled or explained. When Noe orders his sons to build an ark, he can't tell them where the wood will come from. When he sends his daughters-in-law out to gather animals, he can offer no directions, money, or protection. And once the rain starts, they all realize that the true test of their faith is just beginning. Because the family is trapped on the ark with thousands of animals-with no experience feeding or caring for them, and no idea of when the waters will recede. What emerges is a family caught in the midst of an extraordinary Biblical event, with all the tension, humanity-even humor-that implies.

August 2005

Ulysses Grove, the FBI's best profiler, has been on the Sun City Case for three years now without a break. When he passes out at the most recent crime scene, his superiors force him to take some vacation, sending him to Alaska to help give a profile of a 6,000-year-old mummy that is the apparent victim of a murder. When Grove sees the mummy positioned in exactly the same way as the Sun City victims, he realizes he's just broken the case wide open and goes on the hunt for a modern-day serial killer who has roots in ancient evil. Little does he know that he is inextricably involved in a cycle of evil only he can break.

“Frozen (Pinnacle, $6.99) is the latest example of author Jay Bonansinga's impressive range, depth, and audacity. When a frozen corpse apparently buried in Alaskan ice for 6000 years resembles the work of a present day serial killer, Bonansinga nimbly avoids all melodramatic traps and makes his two investigators—an ambitious journalist and a severely troubled FBI profiler—believable and moving human beings caught up in a strange adventure.”

— Dick Adler,
Chicago Tribune Sunday Books Section

September 2005

From the internationally acclaimed author of The Preservationist comes a provocative retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, Abel and Cain—a novel of temptation and murder, of exile and loss.

Once expelled from the garden, Eve and Adam have to find their way past recriminations and bitterness to construct a life together in a harsh land. But the challenges are many for the world's first family. Among their children are Abel and Cain, and soon the adults must discover how to be parents to one son who is everything they could hope for and another who is sullen, difficult, and rife with insecurities and jealousies. In the background, always, is the incomprehensibility of God's motives as He watches over their faltering attempts to build a life. In Fallen, David Maine has drawn a convincing, wryly observant and enthralling portrait of a family—one driven (and riven) by passions, jealousies, irrationality, and love. The result is an intimate, in-depth story of brothers, a husband, and a wife—people whose struggles are both completely familiar and yet utterly original.

From The New York Times

September 8, 2005

At Home With the First Dysfunctional Family

By Janet Maslin

David Maine's Fallen builds suspensefully toward what is arguably the best-known episode in the story of mankind: the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Given the fact that its denouement will surprise exactly nobody, this book's power to rivet the reader approaches the miraculous.

Mr. Maine's brand of biblical fiction first appeared in The Preservationist, a novel that brought wry, crotchety human emotions to the story of Noah's ark. That turns out to have been a dry run for this quirky, delectable, much more daring book. As he manages to fuse genuine reverence and soul-searching with choice exchanges among Cain, Abel, Adam and Eve (“On the seventh day I rested.” “Oh stop.”), Mr. Maine writes in distinctive fashion. His inventiveness recalls Mark Twain's reference to “Satan, the first consultant.”

Fallen—an instantly disarming book, thanks to the image of squabbling cherubs on its cover—is a risky, original undertaking. It is not one of those parasitical fables that siphon all their inspiration from borrowed material. Mr. Maine uses 40 chapters (a number with much biblical resonance, starting with Noah and the flood) to reconstruct the early Book of Genesis in reverse, as a way of amplifying hindsight and regret. So the book begins with the chronologically last part of its story, Chapter 40, when Cain is a tormented old man on the verge of death. He is “stubborn as a tortoise and half as expressive.”

But as Fallen dials backward through time, it begins to make Cain more expressive. By Chapter 34 he is wandering in the desert, bearing God's mark. (“What's that on your face?” ask someone he meets. “Some kind of. Oh.”) He avoids looking in pools of water, but there is no escaping what the stigma commemorates. “You were the whole reason I did this,” confides a feral young boy who has casually committed murder. “You were the, the, inspiration.”

Sometimes Cain is haunted by the ghost of Abel, the brother he killed. The guilt is terrible, but the event grows less absolute as Cain gets younger and Abel returns to life. One of Mr. Maine's imaginative feats in Fallen is to ascribe ordinary motives to the brothers' story, even as he juxtaposes their rivalries with the towering presence of God in their lives.

So when the book revisits the pivotal moment for the brothers—when God accepts Abel's offering of livestock while scorning the harvest offered by Cain—Cain's bitterness is frank. “You never actually have a conversation, do you notice?” he says about God's judgment upon him. “It's a bit more one-sided than that.”

Move backward some more and Cain's grudge against his brother becomes more specific. “His two favorite words are you should, followed by you shouldn't,” the book observes about Abel. “Often the advice is perfectly reasonable, which, of course, makes it no easier to bear.”

And this is hardly the only conflict in what Mr. Maine construes as the planet's first dysfunctional family, with its reside of secrecy, guilt and remorse. Beyond telling his two eldest sons, “Your mother and I are not from here,” Adam has been reluctant to talk about the past.

The book's tensions heighten as it moves inevitably toward revelation and finger-pointing. At first it sanctions Adam's engaging in denial “to allow himself a good chance of getting up each morning and facing the day's demands without falling to earth in foaming, incoherent rage.” But the taunting of his sons means that nothing about the Garden of Eden can remain out of bounds. And as a teenager, Cain is real and petulant enough to complain that the whole story makes no sense. Why didn't God simply remove that forbidden tree if he didn't want Adam and Eve to touch it?

By now Mr. Maine is navigating deep waters. But he is able to juxtapose a boy's naïveté, the original sin of his parents and the most basic and unanswerable theological questions, all in the space of a spare, sometimes ironic story. Was Adam bored when he was alone in the Garden, Cain wonders? “Not exactly bored,” Adam says. “But I will admit to a degree of loneliness after a time. Which brings us to your mother.”

The way Fallen addresses creationism reveals the full measure of its depth and delicacy: again, the boy's literal-mindedness is contrasted with the ineffable knowledge and failure of his father. And again, the book's suspense lies in anticipating how Mr. Maine will deal with the most basic philosophical and religious questions toward which Fallen is moving. Here is the measure of the book's success: its last page is its best.

Mr. Maine's approach to the Scriptures is necessarily adaptive. The early sections of Genesis are very brief and do not lend themselves to any form of pragmatic approach. Adam lived 930 years, according to the King James Bible, and begat many children. This book gives him a more realistic life span, envisions different skin colors among its characters and adds a midlife crisis. The point in his 40's at which Adam realizes that he will one day return to dust makes him yearn desperately for sexual affirmation.

As for begetting, Adam and Eve have a dozen or so children here. But the book brings a sense of astonishment to the arrival of strangers on the scene. Where did they come from? Can they have known Eden? Adam's encounter with one man allows Mr. Maine to underscore the incomparable importance of the events that Fallen takes on. “When I asked about tame lions and stars of many colors, of honeycombs free from bees and flowers that never wilt,” says Adam, now banished to life among rocks and thistles, “he just stared at me as if I were raving.”

November 2005

In the fall of 2003, after a severe and lengthy drought, as well as a bark beetle infestation that killed thousands of trees in San Diego County, the random path of a lost hunter's flare actually set off the worst wildfires in California history. With this true-life burning of the Cleveland National Forest as a backdrop, the novel, En Llamas (Flame) takes on a life of its own, throwing two people together—a man and a woman—who might otherwise never have met.

Joan Eagan is thirty-eight-years-old, single, and a top-notch cop with the physical and psychological skills and scars to prove it. On 9/11, she lost both her fiancé and her faith in God to the rubble of the World Trade Center Disaster. One year later, still broken-hearted and plagued with survivor's guilt, Joan moves to the wide-open spaces of California and takes a position with a small-town police department. She buys a modest house at the foot of an isolated canyon and begins the task of trying to heal her heart in the company of a German shepherd named Greta and two old horses that were included in the price of the house. She also becomes uncharacteristically intrigued with the idea of contacting the dead, and she begins to read about the subject voraciously in the privacy and solitude of her home.

Paul Lutz is in his late forties. He is happily married to his second wife, Annie, and he is the father of two young children. Paul is also a highly successful Hollywood screenwriter with several blockbuster films to his credit. On October 26th, 2003, he sets out to scout locations for the filming of his latest screenplay. Alone in the Cleveland National Forest, Paul finds himself suddenly surrounded by the flames that would eventually become known as the San Diego Firestorm of 2003.

Choking on the smoke and certain that he is about to die, Paul creates a movie in his mind that includes a montage of his favorite family moments spent with Annie and their children. And then he lets go and loses consciousness.

Surprisingly, Paul wakes up to find the fire still raging around him, yet it is easy and painless now for him to breathe. There is a young man with an Hispanic accent giving Paul water and speaking to him in a caring and soothing tone. The man explains that Paul is in "transition"—a stage that exists between life and death—and then points Paul in the direction of Joan Eagan's house before mysteriously vanishing behind a wall of flames.

Together, Joan Eagan and Paul Lutz spend a few magical hours while the fire rages and threatens to consume them. After each one totally accepts the inevitability of their own mortality, the Hispanic man suddenly re-appears out of the flames, accompanied by Joan Eagan's deceased fiancé, Daniel. It soon becomes apparent that the Hispanic man is actually God and that he has employed the spirits of Paul and Daniel to help Joan finally heal her broken heart and to understand that there really is no such thing as death.

As a result of this mystical experience, Joan Eagan not only survives the fire, but now she rises like a phoenix to build a beautiful new life upon the ashes of the old one.

December 2005

Shugyo by John Hamamura (Tom Dunne/St. Martin's Press, Hard Cover)

Growing up on a Hawaiian sugar cane plantation, Sam Hamada is schooled in the martial arts and the traditional culture of his native Japan. While learning to become a man, he has an affair with Yuriko, the Japanese mistress of the plantation foreman. Caught in bed and fighting for his life, Sam causes the foreman to accidentally shoot himself, setting in motion a series of events that will change his life forever.

When forced to move to California, Sam meets Keiko Yanagi, the love of his life. Torn between duty to Yuriko (the woman he believes to be the mother of his child) and passion for Keiko (the woman he knows he is meant to be with) Sam struggles for a way out.

Thinking she has lost Sam forever, Keiko returns to Japan, heartbroken, where her parents begin to arrange a marriage. After two unsuccessful marriage meetings, Keiko travels alone to Tokyo where she discovers Yuriko with a Eurasian baby, one that Sam could not have fathered.

Taking Flight by Lynne Kaufman (Mira/Harlequin, Mass Market Paperback)

Taking Flight
Lynne Kaufman
Mira, Dec 2005, $12.95
ISBN: 0778321886

Even though she has been married twenty years with two children (teenage Davey and pre-adolescent Wendy), Los Angeles Community College Professor Julia Benson feels as if her life can fit inside a packed sardine can. She is unsure whether she loves her husband Mark or ever did while her dying mother residing in a Bronx slum, tells her to live life to the fullest. Julia hopes the two-week trip to Greece in which she, another professor Michael, and the office assistant Sabrina will chaperone thirty female sophomores, will lead to some healthy flirting.

The trip proves a bust as Michael spends his time with Sabrina and the natives flirt with the students. Depressed on the way home, she meets Ted, an oceanic archeologist with his head in the clouds dreaming of finding Atlantis. As they hit it off, Julia wonders if she should run away to help Ted find his dream or be responsible to a spouse and two kids who cherish her.

Readers will appreciate the gender bending middle age crisis as Julia has her second identity issue after having obtained a new role when she returned to school to obtain a Masters and a teaching job so that she could be a professor, not just a wife and mother. That proved not fulfilling enough making fans wonder whether the delightful protagonist will take flight with Ted or return to her adoring family. This character driven tale entices the audience because no one is nasty or abusive driving Julia away; to the contrary her family loves her. Lynne Kaufman provides a fabulous tale of a woman on the crossroads taking stock of where her life is going while readers and her will wonder who she chooses.

— Harriet Klausner

Taking Flight

I was debating whether I'd blog about this Lynne Kaufman title. But some parts of it, most of it, in fact, I loved so much that I just have to. Community college Prof. in twenty-year ho-hum marriage (exact mirror of my life, so being the egoist I am, I love that part) goes to Greece with her students and finds unexpected love. I adored that Kaufman made the whole falling in love thing so absolutely unexpected and real. And I loved all the literary Greek talk. And the new age stuff, too, like Atlantis. Yes, Atlantis. I've always been fascinated by that legend, and Kaufman is too.

— Vernon L. Smith, 2001 Nobel Prize Winner

“This book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand how the world really works and why economic freedom is the central ingredient of prosperity. If every citizen would read this book, our politics would be more enlightened and our nation more prosperous.”

— Senator Connie Mack

• Do taxes help more than they hurt?
• What effect does redistributing wealth have on our economy—and those who participate in its redistribution?
• What is the role of government?
• How does an economy work?

James Gwartney, Richard L. Stroup, and Dwight R. Lee are three of the most prominent economists today, and in Common Sense Economics they show us why economic understanding is an essential ingredient for life in today's society, a key element that empowers those who possess it to better take charge of their own lives and their own responsibilities to their society. In clear, powerful language free of any hint of jargon or obscurity, they illuminate the basic principles of supply and demand, private ownership, trade, and more. In a world where free trade, taxes, and government spending are issues everyone needs to understand, Common Sense Economics is a lucid, simple explanation of how and why our economy and our world work the way they do, and how and why individuals and nations prosper.

Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond by Essie Mae Washington-Williams and
William Stadiem (Regan Books/HarperCollins, Hard Cover)

In Dear Senator, Essie Mae Washington-Williams—daughter of the late Senator Strom Thurmond—breaks her lifelong silence and tells the story of her life. Hers is a story seven decades in the making, yet one whose unique historical importance has only recently been revealed. Until the age of sixteen, Washington-Williams assumed that the aunt and uncle who raised her in Pennsylvania were her parents. The revelation of her true parents' identities was a shock that changed the course of her life. Her father, the longtime senator from South Carolina, was once the nation's leading voice for racial segregation; he ran for president on a segregationist ticket in 1948 and once mounted a twenty-four-hour filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957—in the name of saving the South from "mongrelization." Her mother was Carrie Butler, a black teenager who worked as a maid on the Thurmond family's South Carolina plantation.

Set against the explosively changing times of the civil rights movement, Washington-Williams's memoir reveals a brave young woman who struggled with the discrepancy between the father she knew—one who was financially generous, supportive of her education, even affectionate—and the old Southern politician, railing against greater racial equality, who refused to acknowledge their relationship in public. She describes what it felt like to face overt racism, especially in the slow-to-change South, despite the fact that her father was the most powerful politician in Dixie. From her richly told narrative emerges a nuanced, fascinating portrait of a father who counseled his daughter about her goals, and supported her in reaching them—but who was ultimately unwilling to break with the values of his Dixiecrat constituents.

With elegance, candor, and spirit, Essie Mae Washington-Williams gives us a chapter of American history as it has never been written before—told in a voice that will be heard and cherished by generations.

A Travel Guide to Heaven by Anthony DeStefano (Fujitomo, Japan, Hard Cover)

Forget angels playing harps. In this fascinating, comforting book, DeStefano takes the reader on a tour of heaven, painting it as a dynamic place of unlimited joy, and using Scripture and dramatic imagination to fill in details about the afterlife. "God doesn't throw away the good things he creates," he writes, an idea which is the basis of many of his speculations about heaven. Heaven is a tangible place, believes DeStefano, and at least part of it will be a transformed new earth. People will have their own recognizable bodies, only perfected. DeStefano tackles tough questions about heaven, including the role of angels, the measurement of time, marriages and whether pets will be there ("Of course!"). Fears of boredom are dispelled with his depictions of possible activities ("How about a tour of the Andromeda galaxy?") and creative work ("Books will be written and read, public structures will be built and utilized"). However, he writes that nothing will compare with the thrill of meeting God, the source of true happiness. DeStefano persuasively argues that the idea of heaven is a positive force on earth, since "faith in God and heaven makes you more interested in what you do in this life—not less." He is neither an academic nor a professional theologian, which gives the book its delightfully conversational tone and frees him to conjecture without restraint. Many readers will find DeStefano's solid Christian framework reassuring and his exciting picture of heaven compelling.

March 2005

Man With Farm Seeks Woman With Tractor by Laura Schaeffer (Thunder's Mouth, Trade Paperback Original)

With Match.com and other Internet dating sites signing up thousands of new users per month, personal ads are a multi-million dollar business and an integral part of American popular culture.

But what most current users of the personals ads don't realize is that the phenomenon is far from new; in fact, the concept of using mass media to find romance goes back as far as the 1700's. Advertising for Love provides readers with the best—and worst—personal ads of all-time.

The author, Laura Schaefer, writes regular dating and romance feature stories for Match.com, which appear at the MSN Love and Relationships Channel. Her writing on personal ads has also appeared in The New York Times.

Chocolate for a Mother's Heart by Kay Allenbaugh (Barnes and Noble/Fireside, Hard Cover)

Mothers do it all—they teach, listen, guide, and protect. They shelter us from life's unexpected storms, nurture us into adulthood, and know just when to push us from the nest. Now the creator of the bestselling Chocolate series offers up a rich, soulful celebration of motherhood, one that any woman—mother, daughter, sister, or best friend—will love. Here are more true stories that capture the essence of what it means to be a woman and that honor the unforgettable experience of mothering, from the heartwarming and hilarious to the bittersweet: a mother sending her child off to school, or down the aisle...a mother who knows just what to say and when to say it—or keep it to herself...a stand-in mom who passes for the "real thing" with flying colors...a mother whose intuition never fails....You're sure to recognize yourself—or your own mom—in the pages of Chocolate for a Mother's Heart.

April 2005

A Million Thanks by Shauna Fleming with L. A. Stamford (Doubleday, Hard Cover)

Moved by her encounters with American soldiers and their families, 15-year-old Shauna set out to find a way to let our troops know how much we appreciate them. Her aim was as simple as it was extraordinary—to collect one million thank you letters from all over the country and distribute them to our military personnel here and abroad. Less than six months after she launched the "A Million Thanks" campaign, Shauna reached that goal.

This book combines the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a teenager just stepping into the world with the stirring realism of military life. Images of wonder at Shauna's first television interview are juxtaposed against an e-mail message from a woman who just lost her nephew to the fighting in Iraq. Overwhelmingly, though, the message here is inspirational and unabashedly patriotic. It's about a girl who can't even vote yet bringing smiles and a sense of appreciation to people who sacrifice so much to defend our country. And it's about the outpouring of emotion she has experienced from around the country and, in fact, throughout the world (her Web site, www.amillionthanks.org, has been visited by residents of more than 110 countries) from like-minded people who want to be a part of her efforts.

The Sinking of the Eastland: America's Forgotten Tragedy by Jay Bonansinga (Kensington, Trade Paperback)

"Chicago, July 24, 1915: Over 2,000 Western Electric employees and their families, dressed in their finest, arrived early at the riverfront to board the Eastland, a bold and breathtaking steamship. That morning the boat was scheduled to ferry its passengers to the annual company picnic in Michigan City. Suddenly, as it sat in port, the Eastland began to list. While thousands of people watched in horror, the ship rolled to its side and silently capsized, killing a staggering 844 people. Unlike the fabled sinking of the Titanic three years before, the Eastland disaster has somehow been lost within the annals of recent American history. Now award-winning writer and Chicagoan Jay Bonansinga has set out to discover why. Using eyewitness narratives, rare archival materials, and first-hand accounts from those who escaped with their lives, Bonansinga pieces together the untold story of the sinking of the Eastland in the only book ever devoted to the human drama of the subject. Bringing to life all the sights and sounds of 1915 Chicago, Bonansinga recounts minute by minute the extraordinary events of that fateful day. He explores the secrets behind the Eastland's troubled past, why the catastrophe could have been predicted, and how safety measures taken in the wake of the Titanic disaster ironically contributed to the Eastland's demise." You'll meet the master of the Eastland, Captain Harry Pederson, whose behavior before, during, and after the accident would be scrutinized for years to come; the Eastland's crew, some of whom became helpless victims of the wreck; both lucky and unlucky passengers, including a thirteen-year-old girl faced with the fight of her life; and a young mechanic who became one of the day's unsung heroes.

May 2005

Stuck on You by Katie Gates and Tim Knight (Chamberlain Bros., Hard Cover)

As a parody of the self-help industry, the Stuck On You gift book series begins with Do-It-Yourself Dating: Stuck On You Patches for the Single Gal. Tired of dating? Why not take matters into your own hands?

As many 30-something women know, dating is tough. Even allowing for falling standards, finding Mr. Right is difficult, maybe impossible. This book brightens the day with its no-fail solution: The four-step relationship patch! With humorous illustrations and big attitude, this book will appeal to many women who feel they've seen it all, but still have a sense of humor about it.

Marked for Death by Brian Karem (Avon Books, Mass Market Paperback)

To everyone who knew him, respected California attorney and popular horse enthusiast Larry McNabney was insanely in love with his young wife Elisa—and she returned his affection in kind. For six blissful years, they made the rounds of the country club and horse racing circuit, arm-in-arm.

But the cheerful, devoted spouse was not what she appeared. A drug-addled grafter, she had fled to Florida, leaving a trail of lies and petty crimes in her wake. A dangerous thrill-seeker, her exhilarating smile masked a psyche steeped in pure rage—even as she seduced her 'straight-arrow' husband with a taste of the wild life.

But her crowning evil was still to come, a heinous plan devised with her partner in crime, Sarah, her female lover and equal in ruthlessness: the coldly orchestrated death of Larry McNabney.

June 2005

Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless by Steve Salerno (Crown Publishing, Hard Cover)

Sham is a no-holds-barred look at a phenomenon that's at the center of the devolution of today's American attitudes and values. In this important work, Author Steve Salerno will show how, far from just having an impact on individual disciples, the self-help movement's unproven rhetoric has found its way into a variety of contemporary institutions, including politics, academics, health care, corporate life, and even sports.

Many of these so-called philosophies (collectively the "Self-Help and Actualization Movement, or SHAM") have been embraced into the social mainstream. The book exposes how SHAM has created its own class of perpetual victims: people for whom self-help is as addicting, and as much of a detour on the road to a productive life, as alcoholism, chronic infidelity, compulsiveness, "codependency," or the other hang-ups that typically drive one to seek SHAM enlightenment in the first place.

Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless Steve Salerno. Crown, $24.95 (272 p.)
ISBN 1-4000-5409-5

You! Yes, you! Are you addicted to self-help books? Do you require "empowerment" to reverse your "victimhood"? If so, relax—you're far from alone. The Self-Help and Actualization Movement (the titular SHAM) is, according to Salerno, an $8-billion-a-year industry that depends on legions of repeat customers. Salerno presents a carefully researched—and devastating—exposé on Sham's predatory and fraudulent practices and its corrosive effects on society. As former Editor of Men's Health magazine's books program, Salerno knows the terrain from the inside. With judicious delight, he exposes the grandiloquent bluster and blithe hypocrisy of Dr. Phil (who, psychologists say, shames rather than helps his guests) and Dr. Laura (the preacher of family values who didn't know when her own mother was murdered), among many others. He cites examples of junk science, such as Tony Robbins's talk of "the energy frequency of foods," and charges that untested alternative medicine draws people away from proven medical treatments. In addition to detailing the raw facts, Salerno excels at pinpointing the self-abnegating strategy the self-help industry employs: namely, tearing you down in the name of building you up. And the positivity yields questionable results in any case. The self-help industry should not be dismissed as "silly but benign," says Salerno, and he documents how it has undermined psychology, education and health care in this blistering critique. (June 28)

— Publishers Weekly

Every Move You Make is the true story of Investigator James Horton's 12-year pursuit of serial killer Gary C. Evans. Evans was a master thief and egomaniac who had a fondness for stealing, among other things, priceless antiques, and a terrifying ruthlessness that led him to murder anyone who got in his way. One time, he stole a 2,000 pound granite bench, transported it over one hundred miles, and sold it at an auction in Manhattan. No one was ever able to figure out how he completed this feat alone.

Through it all, Investigator Horton was relentlessly on Evans's trail. He got so close so many times that, amazingly, the two began a strange and complex friendship. Evans would regularly call Horton at home, and Horton came to develop an unlikely trust in this killer, even as Horton was trying to catch him. When Evans was finally caught in 1998, and killed in an escape attempt, the cat-and-mouse chase came to an end, but the questions and intrigue in the story remained.

There is a seemingly endless supply of new and over hyped methodologies for helping businesses get things done. But none of those methodologies address one of the most fundamental problems in business today: our fear of face-to-face confrontation.

The Art of Constructive Confrontation shows why confrontation isn't something we should fear at all, but is instead something we should embrace and use to our advantage. Constructive confrontation can be the difference between people just doing things and people getting things done.

Often, when we think of confrontation, we think of conflict and anger. But constructive confrontation isn't conflict; it's a structured, systematic approach to decreasing conflict and increasing accountability in the workplace. Unlike other business improvement methodologies, it doesn't cost you money and you can implement it today. Constructive confrontation works because it's simple.

In The Art of Constructive Confrontation, authors John Hoover Ph.D. and Roger P. DiSilvestro present their straightforward, common sense system in three easy steps. First, any project undertaken must be treated like a promise, or covenant, between each team member and his or her team leaders. This covenant includes well-articulated and precise expectations so that each person knows what to do and when to do it. Second, planned follow-up meetings—or confrontations—must be scheduled and consistently conducted to ensure that everyone makes progress as expected and gets past surprise roadblocks. Finally, satisfactory completion of all goals must be celebrated and rewarded as a foundation for the next task or project.

Continuous accountability is a simple concept, but can quickly get lost in the pressurized world of business, where good plans fall apart as work overflows and day-to-day crises take precedence. Constructive confrontation prevents this by keeping projects on schedule through a step-based, systematic approach. Goals are well articulated and documented, and confrontation is planned. Next, all parties to the constructive confrontation covenant are required to confront each other regularly in a spirit not of fear, but of dedication and commitment to a common goal. Finally, celebration and rewards reinforce each individual's importance, builds departmental and organizational character, and keeps everyone focused on the finish line.

As team members and team leaders journey through the cycle from start to finish, constructive confrontation provides ample opportunity for course correction and adaptation to new realities. Not only is it simple and effective, it's flexible and adaptive—and it works for any business in any industry. For anyone assigned to a task or project, as well as the leaders responsible for seeing that the work gets done—and gets done right and on time—The Art of Constructive Confrontation is the most powerful tool available to increase accountability and decrease conflict.

“There's no magic formula for building a successful enterprise, large or small. If you're in the business of making a profit, you're in the business of building people. First you build your people. After that, your people produce the profit. The Art of Constructive Confrontation is an easy-to-follow, systematic process that makes sure you don't get those things backwards. Constructive confrontation is the closest thing you'll ever find to hold people accountable for what they do, while at the same time reducing the conflicts that get in the way of productivity and, ultimately, profits.”

— Spencer Hays, Founder, The Tom James Company Executive Chairman,
Southwestern/Great American, Inc.

“The Art of Constructive Confrontation is a clear and concise road map to making the all-important conversations between team leaders and team members happen. More than that, the constructive confrontation process keeps those conversations happening, keeps them consistent and constructive, keeps everybody accountable, and unleashes the leadership potential in everyone.”

— Angelo Valenti, Ph.D., Leader of
The Company Psychologist and co-author,Unleashing Leadership

“Embracing constructive confrontation builds a strong, effective leader with a strong, effective team. This book covers the step-by-step process to make you that kind of leader.”

— Danny Cox, co-author, Leadership When the Heat's On

August 2005

How Judges Are Judged
A Look at the Inside of “The Borking Rebellion.”
By Quin Hillyer

In late 2001, a Senate Democratic staffer wrote a memo dividing President George W. Bush's judicial nominees into the categories of “good,” “bad” and “ugly,” depending (as the staffer acknowledged) on “input from the groups” of activists who were tracking paper trails and political beliefs. D. Brooks Smith, a federal district judge from western Pennsylvania nominated to the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, was among those in the “good” category.

The designation didn't last for long. Judge Smith became the target of a “borking,” a campaign of histrionic criticism intended to block a presidential appointment. (The term derives from the travails of Robert Bork in 1987, when he was nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court but denied confirmation after an ugly assault on his character.) The Senate eventually confirmed Judge Smith, but only after he had been held in limbo for nine months and accused of mendacity, ethical transgressions and a bias against women.

In retrospect, the accusations have a burlesque quality—as if someone were playing a game, twisting harmless nothings into major crimes. But it was no joke at the time. It was a kind of hell. In The Borking Rebellion, Jeffrey Lord—a friend of Mr. Smith's and a former Reagan aide—recounts the ordeal in instructive detail.

To take a small but telling episode: Judge Smith had long belonged to an all-male hunting-and-fishing club—he had joined as a little boy, following his grandfather. On a judicial questionnaire he had rightly described it as a social club and not a business one; thus his membership violated no code of ethics. But his opponents found a one-time club guest saying that a group of doctors had met at the club, implying that the site had served professional purposes. For a few days this absurd charge—gender discrimination!—floated in the press, until the guest in question came forward to say that his comments had been ripped out of context: (a) It was not a business meeting; (b) it was not a group of doctors, merely a picnic at which a few doctors had been present, with their wives. Out of such technicalities are controversies made.

Then there was the Violence Against Women Act. Echoing the concerns of many judges and law-enforcement officials, Judge Smith had criticized the act for making federal civil cases out of matters routinely handled by state criminal courts. Judge Smith's critics, by insinuation more than argument, construed such views to be a sign of his insensitivity to the female victims of violence, if not to women generally. It did not help his cause that Joseph Biden, a leading Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was a prominent proponent of the act.

Most spectacularly, activist groups slammed Judge Smith for failing to disclose a conflict of interest in a fraud case. The case in question was a civil suit brought on behalf of a Pennsylvania school district against a district official for investing its money badly and then hiding his losses by means of a Ponzi scheme. The plaintiffs eventually tried to recover money from various banks that, wittingly or not, abetted the official's fraudulent transactions. What was the conflict? Judge Smith's wife held a low-level job at one of the banks, and the judge himself owned a small amount of stock in it.

Whether these facts amount to a conflict is debatable. In any case, Judge Smith recused himself within a month of the case's being assigned to him, even before the plaintiffs had alleged bank involvement. Such a scruple would normally win praise from the ethicists who worry about such things. But the judge's recusal did not count for much once the conflict charge had been leveled against him.

“Appeals Court Choice Accused of Acting Improperly,” blared the Washington Post, with other news outlets following suit. The accounts routinely sheared away a fuller version of the truth. It did not seem to matter that none of the parties to the case had ever accused Judge Smith of acting improperly or that the judge had shown an overabundance of caution, recusing himself despite a “conflict” that involved about three degrees of separation.

Mr. Lord is at pains to note that, although Judge Smith is less known than other judicial nominees who have come under “borking” assault—think of William Pryor, Miguel Estrada, Janice Rogers Brown and Charles Pickering—his experience offers a kind of template of abuse: Activist groups unearth whatever harmful details they can find, no matter how dubious; they gin them up into screaming charges; the charges in turn get picked up by reporters, eager to keep pace with a potential “controversy,” and by politicians, eager to find any stick with which to beat a “dangerous” nominee from the opposing party. Sometimes the conduit trail is explicit. Mr. Lord finds that all but seven of the 28 questions that Sen. Russ Feingold (D., Wis.) asked of Judge Smith came, often word for word, from activist-group memos.

For Robert Bork the result of such abuse was defeat as well as humiliation. But this is a story with a happy ending. A group of Pennsylvanians of all political stripes—“The Phalanx,” as its members called themselves—gathered to defend Judge Smith, having personally witnessed his fairness and integrity. Leading the way were Amy Greer, a liberal Democrat; Maureen Kelly, an activist in the presidential campaigns of Ted Kennedy and Al Gore; and Lynette Norton, an unsuccessful Clinton nominee for a federal district judgeship. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania's centrist-Republican senator, did the rest, tirelessly lobbying for votes in the Judiciary Committee. He even managed to bring Mr. Biden onboard.

Mr. Lord's account is vividly anecdotal—an entertaining read. He is not, though, a stylist. At one point we encounter nominees “frozen in the glare of the local public spotlight.” Elsewhere “ominous pieces of borking graffiti” are “scrawled on the proverbial political wall that was the Internet.” Such infelicities, and there are many, can make Mr. Lord's tale tough going. Still, it is an instructive one, with an uplifting moral. Republican virtues—the small-“r” variety—can still overcome powerful, malignant forces.

Mr. Hillyer is an Editorial Writer for the Mobile (Ala.) Register.

September 2005

At last, the prayers of single men everywhere have been answered. M.A.C.K. Tactics™ Volume One: The Science of Seduction Meets the Art of Hostage Negotiation is the ultimate guide for today's man in his quest to succeed with women. M.A.C.K. Tactics puts a hip spin on negotiator psychology and strategy and applies it to the dating game, resulting in revolutionary ways to approach women—and life—with greater skill and confidence.

Written in a hip, humorous style, and packed with information and inspiration, M.A.C.K. Tactics is a complete course of self-improvement for the modern man. It covers it all, 'from the fashion to the passion," taking readers on a step-by-step journey towards achieving their full masculine potential.

John Ol' “Chumbucket” Baur and Mark “Cap'n Slappy” Summers, a pair of friends from Oregon, came up with the idea of an international holiday on which everyone is not just permitted but encouraged to talk like a pirate all day long. Their idea went around the world faster than Francis Drake. The English sea captain took almost three years to circumnavigate the globe; Talk Like a Pirate Day required just weeks to circle the planet. Millions of people on all seven continents—yes, even Antarctica!—got aboard and for the last three years have filled the air every September 19^th with “Aarrrs!” and “Avasts!” and “Yo-hos!,” among many other nautical phrases. Now the pair will share their booty of pirate lore and high-seas hijinks in Pirattitude: So You Wanna Be a Pirate?

November 2005

Final Verdict: The Simple Truth in the Killing of JFK by Vincent Bugliosi with Fred Haines (W. W. Norton, Hard Cover)

December 2005

Selling to customers looking to get the most bang for their buck is a difficult feat. The only customers tougher than hagglers are the ones so uninformed about what they are buying; they don't even realize when they are getting the deal of a lifetime.

How to Sell to an Idiot, authors John Hoover Ph.D. and Bill Sparkman show you how to ignore your own inner idiot and start selling more by doing less of what doesn't work and more of what does. Along with a wealth of proven sales guidance and effective techniques, you'll learn how to:

• Use idiot-proof planning and preparation to make prospecting far more effective Use idiot-speak to connect with prospects and gather vital information that makes selling easy
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• Wring referrals out of clients like water from a sponge
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“Selling is an act of compassion. Sales professionals must believe that their products and services will improve the quality of their customers' lives. Hoover and Sparkman get that. Selling must also be fun—for the salesperson and the customer. How to Sell to an Idiot makes it clear that the first laugh of the day must be at ourselves.”

— Roger P. DiSilvestro, former Chairman and CEO, Athlon Sports Publishing
and co-author of The Art of Constructive Confrontation

“How to Sell to an Idiot hits the bull's-eye. Great practical steps that will help anyone in sales reach the goal line. Truly a creative approach with fresh new ideas delivered with humor.”

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K. Hovnanian Homes, a Fortune 500 Company

“How to Sell to an Idiot provides an entertaining and creative look at the formula for sales success. Insightful and fun, you'd have to be an idiot not to add this book to your resource library!”

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About the Authors

John Hoover Ph.D. is an organizational behavior specialist, author, consultant, popular speaker, and seminar leader. A former executive in the Disneyland Entertainment Division, he has consulted with such clients as Boeing, Delta Air Lines, Hilton Hotels, IBM, Motorola, and Xerox. He is also the author (with Roger DiSilvestro) of The Art of Constructive Confrontation: How to Achieve More Accountability with Less Conflict, from John Wiley and Sons.

Visit www.constructiveconfrontation.com or www.idiotworld.org.

Bill Sparkmanis one of America's top sales trainers and motivational speakers. His approach to business and life has thrilled audiences since 1987. His “clipboard” style of educating was developed after a successful career in the world of sports as a player and coach. Fire up your sales team; Bill makes learning fun!

Visit www.billsparkmanthecoach.com.