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NEW WEB PAGE NOW UP
•2 min read
The updated page reflects a series of new book publications that will continue to appear over the next two or three months.
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Thoughts on writing, storytelling, and the creative process
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Rivers and Me
•9 min read
From Adirondack streams to the 30-million-year-old Thames—where hippos once wallowed in Trafalgar Square—a meditation on rivers, history, and the enduring freedom of public waterways.
Read More →Music & Culture
Ronnie Scott's – Famous London Jazz Club
•7 min read
Stumbling upon Ronnie Scott's Soho jazz club in the 1970s sparked a lifelong love of live music and inspired a bar back home—a tribute to the institution still packing them in over sixty years on.
Read More →Personal
How Smoking Rewrote History
•7 min read
A roll call of Hollywood icons, royals, and politicians whose early deaths from smoking robbed the world of immeasurable talent—and a grateful tribute to parents who quit for their child's sake.
Read More →Writing Life
The Family Business
•7 min read
Celebrating the publication of son Callum Angus's first book and reflecting on four generations of writers in the family—from a Siberian exile translating Russian poetry to a Pushcart Prize nominee.
Read More →Reading
The Ice at the End of the World
•6 min read
A review of Jon Gertner's book tracing how Greenland's explorers evolved from frostbitten adventurers to laser-scanning climate researchers racing to understand a rapidly melting ice sheet.
Read More →Current Events
America on Defense
•6 min read
A breakdown of America's $1.25 trillion annual national security spend—spread across ten separate budgets—and the staggering opportunity cost of choosing endless foreign wars over investment at home.
Read More →Science
The Ends of the Universe
•6 min read
The James Webb Space Telescope's imminent launch prompts reflections on the search for extraterrestrial life, the appeal of collective intelligence, and whether humans can survive their own technology.
Read More →Research
The Last Great Stories of WW II
•8 min read
The story of Justus Rosenberg—teenage courier for Varian Fry's secret rescue network, French Resistance fighter, and Bard professor—one of the last living links to the heroism of the Holocaust era.
Read More →Technology
Artificial Intelligence and Henry Kissinger?
•5 min read
A new book on AI co-authored by the 98-year-old Kissinger raises eyebrows, but it's the GPT-3 AI writing assistant used to review it that gives fellow writers real cause for concern.
Read More →Writing Life
Turning Points
•7 min read
From a Siberian exile's journey to Ellis Island to writing the biography of a 104-year-old Adirondack legend—reflecting on how unrecognized turning points quietly shape a writing life.
Read More →Current Events
America Unprepared for Pandemic
•5 min read
Written at the outset of COVID-19, drawing parallels between Flypaper—a 2014 thriller about a pandemic starting in China—and the real-world failure to heed decades of scientific and literary warnings.
Read More →Current Events
Election Year 2020
•6 min read
Written on the morning of Election Day 2020, a stark assessment of what four more years of Trump would mean for American democracy—and what record-breaking voter turnout might signal.
Read More →Research
Germany's Best and Worst U-boat Commander
•7 min read
Fritz Julius Lemp sank the first ship of WWII and inadvertently handed Britain the Enigma machine—the decorated U-boat commander who may have contributed more to Germany's defeat than any other.
Read More →Research
Amazing Story of Survival in WW II
•5 min read
Nicholas Alkemade fell 18,000 feet from a burning Lancaster bomber without a parachute and survived with a sprained ankle—an incredible true story that may have inspired a 1946 David Niven film.
Read More →Reading
Einstein and Creativity
•6 min read
Reading about Einstein's thought experiments alongside a cousin's book of avant-garde music reviews—including a concert performed on New York City buildings—reveals how unfamiliar territory sparks creative breakthroughs.
Read More →Personal
Looking Back – 1969
•7 min read
An attic diary kept by his parents during their 1969 European travels brings back a nineteen-year-old's solo bicycle trip through Denmark—battling gale winds and a nighttime campsite invaded by hundreds of snails.
Read More →Research
Vikings in Space
•6 min read
Satellite archaeologist Sarah Parcak's discovery of a probable second Viking site in Newfoundland, and a 13,000-year-old girl found in a Yucatan cave, prove once again that truth is stranger than fiction.
Read More →Research
Little Boys and Kennewick Man
•6 min read
A boyhood fascination with bog bodies, mummies, and ancient remains—sparked by travels to Pompeii, Stonehenge, and Istanbul—finds its way into fiction and connects to the controversial story of Kennewick Man.
Read More →Personal
Ghosts in My Supermarket
•4 min read
Shopping in the same store for sixty years means navigating a parade of faces from the past—some familiar, some mistaken for the long-dead—and confronting the strange arithmetic of one's own mortality.
Read More →Reading
A Daughter's Tale
•7 min read
Mary Soames's memoir about growing up as Churchill's youngest daughter offers an intimate, ringside view of WWII—including a personal connection through the 1939 sinking of the liner Athenia.
Read More →Personal
West Point and Vietnam
•8 min read
Ken Burns's Vietnam documentary triggers memories of draft lotteries, Washington marches, a friend's West Point cadetship, and a pair of General Westmoreland's boots still stinking up a corner of the barn.
Read More →Research
The Serendipity of Research
•5 min read
Researching bog bodies for a Nova Scotia mystery leads to the unexpected discovery of Samuel de Champlain's astrolabe, unearthed by loggers from an Ontario peat bog in 1867.
Read More →Personal
A Sense of Place – The Adirondack Park
•6 min read
A lifetime spent near the Adirondack Park and the writers, activists, and wilderness advocates who shaped both the landscape and a personal voice as a writer and environmental observer.
Read More →Writing Life
Close Encounters
•7 min read
Stories of literary heroes, a love letter to Edward Abbey, a drunken John Carradine at a faculty dinner, and the astonishing discovery of a shared unrequited crush with a beloved mentor.
Read More →Research
Churchill and Hitler – Notorious Artists
•5 min read
Comparing the paintings of Churchill and Hitler reveals their contrasting characters—one full of passion and vibrant color, the other cold and utilitarian—mirroring their very different legacies.
Read More →Reading
On Hitler's Mountain
•5 min read
A review of Irmgard Hunt's memoir about growing up steps away from Hitler's alpine retreat—offering a child's-eye view of how an entire nation was gradually seduced by Nazism.
Read More →Personal
Adventure Rerun
•6 min read
Exploring how adventure has changed from the age of Shackleton and Hillary into today's spectacle of motorcycles at the North Pole—and what that says about our need for relevance in a crowded world.
Read More →Personal
A Sense of Place – Halifax, Nova Scotia
•7 min read
A lifelong connection to Nova Scotia—from parrots-screaming aunts to Titanic graves and Nazi U-boats in the harbor—reveals why this overlooked region deserves far more attention from writers and travelers.
Read More →Research
Winston Churchill as Hero
•6 min read
A nuanced portrait of Churchill as a deeply flawed yet indispensable figure—racist, alcoholic, visionary, and brave—and why his contradictions make him the ultimate protagonist for historical fiction.
Read More →Personal
Autumn
•4 min read
An ode to fall in the North Country of far northern New York State—celebrating the season's colors, rhythms, and the way it makes a rolling landscape feel both timeless and gloriously alive.
Read More →Reading
Churchill's Last Years
•7 min read
A remarkable little book by Churchill's personal attendant reveals the great man in his final years—yachting with Onassis, gambling at Monte Carlo, and still charming world leaders into his late eighties.
Read More →Writing Life
Sequel to My Thriller Flypaper
•5 min read
A handful of post-pandemic survivors and a mysterious radio signal from the poisoned shores of the Aral Sea—the Soviet bioweapons testing ground—form the backdrop for a new thriller sequel.
Read More →Writing Life
Why Writers Struggle
•5 min read
Reflections on the intensely competitive nature of the creative arts and the stubborn, ego-fueled determination required to keep going despite obscurity, rejection, and non-existent royalties.
Read More →Reading
Are Books Going Away?
•5 min read
Observing a waiting room where no one reads and a hockey arena full of glowing screens raises urgent questions about the future of books in an age of publishing consolidation and e-readers.
Read More →Personal
A Sense of Place – Istanbul
•8 min read
Living in Istanbul at thirteen in 1963—waving to Jackie Kennedy on Onassis's yacht, learning of JFK's assassination on a Black Sea cruise—left an indelible mark still demanding to be written about.
Read More →Personal
A Sense of Place – London
•7 min read
A lifelong love affair with London—from watching Cleopatra at thirteen to riding ancient wooden escalators into the underground—and how a passion for the city's layered history shaped a writing career.
Read More →Writing Life
Publishing in the Age of Armageddon
•8 min read
A humorous, personal account of the challenges facing writers in the publishing world, including a manuscript destroyed when a car crashed through the president's office at ninety miles an hour.
Read More →Reading
A Book at the Right Moment
•6 min read
Reflections on how the right book at the right age can be transformative—from Tarzan in Mexico to Tolkien in Istanbul—and the desire to create that same experience for young readers.
Read More →Writing Life
Writers and Humble Pie
•7 min read
Tales from author's nights and book signings that taught valuable lessons in humility—from being outsold by local legends to spending the night with two beloved Adirondack literary icons.
Read More →Research
The Mystery of Unknown Titanic Survivors
•2 min read
A brief speculation on the intriguing possibility that some Titanic survivors escaped unknown—with no record of their passage—and how that idea became the seed of a thriller novel.
Read More →Research
Secrets of Underground London
•8 min read
A journey beneath London's streets reveals hidden rivers, Roman ruins, Victorian sewers teeming with rats, war rooms, and centuries of buried history lurking underfoot.
Read More →