In Chapter Two of The Faithful, Caroline and Reggie go at at it hot and heavy. Everyone knows about the affair except her fiance Evan. How will they ever keep it from him?
They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It can also drive you mad with fear. The conditions that the 19-year-old soldier-hero of Kenneth Waymon Baker’s Alone in the Valley faces in the steamy jungles of the Central Vietnamese Highlands are so terrifying that it’s all he can do from succumbing to chronic terror. From the moment he touches down until he is airborne on his way home from the war, this young hero’s senses are on hair-trigger alert. It’s what enables him to survive and emerge as a warrior, but at a nightmarish price.
Publisher’s Weekly said, “This first novel by a disabled Vietnam veteran compassionately examines a year in the life of a combat infantryman during that conflict. As the protagonist…gains experience in the field, so does the reader, who comes to share his heightened awareness and sense of paranoia…The narrative remains focused on the grunt’s life of monotony mixed with fear, so powerfully evoked as to provide a better understanding of why many veterans have never entirely overcome the war’s terrors…an absorbing plot unfurled with gripping realism and an evocative sense of time and place will stir memories and convictions.”
– Richard Curtis
Given the fact that Carol Severance is a Hawaii-based writer, it’s no surprise that so much of her fantasy fiction focuses on the sea. After narrowly escaping death in a forest fire, the human heroine of Reefsong is equipped with webbed hands and gills by the company that saved her life. Now all she has to do is learn how to breathe underwater.
But she does it, and her skill liberates her to find a secret that could end starvation on our planet. Her corporate sponsors have ideas of their own about exploiting her discovery, and things turn extremely ugly.
Once you’ve undergone your sea change with Reefsong you’ll be ready for Severance’s wildly imaginative Island Warrior Trilogy.
- Richard Curtis
“Romance on the Run” was not the title we wanted when our agency sold Tara Roth Madden’s celebration of quick sex between married couples, but the publisher was nervous about baldly advocating quickies. Though a hasty roll in the sack sounds like the furthest thing from romantic, Madden says it does more to rekindle the flame of romance for a long-married couple than the predictable five pound box of chocolates and bouquet of red roses. Men and women whose spontaneity has been all but squeezed out of their marriage by the routines of work schedules, domestic chores, and childrearing, can not only revive the flame of desire but set their marriages ablaze by snatching two minutes of mad, dangerous lovemaking while the kids are playing in the yard or guests are in the den watching a football game.
The author interviewed many real couples and learned how joyous monogamy can be when given an unscheduled booster shot of lust. Read Romance on the Run but be prepared to expand your definition of “romance”.
- Richard Curtis
No one has ever accused Robert Vaughan of thinking small. His American Chronicles tell the story of Twentieth Century United States in nine volumes starting 1904 and ending in the 1960s. Though each novel stands on its own, they are related and intertwined in countless ways, making the Chronicles far closer to a tapestry than to a series. For instance, in Flower Children, the ninth book, the rebellious heiress who drops out and tunes into the San Francisco’s 1960s Summer of Love is a descendant of the courageous Suffragist heroine of the first book, Dawn of the Century.
Vaughan’s saga is a panorama of the explosive economic, political and social forces of the last century that continue to shape us in the current one. Nine wonderful reads for historians and fiction lovers alike.
- Richard Curtis
The recent scandal that brought down New York Governor Eliot Spitzer awakened memories of another precipitous fall, that of New York State Chief Judge Sol Wachtler. Like Spitzer, Wachtler was a mighty New York personage whose high office and reputation for rectitude stood in glaring contrast to the almost unimaginably bizarre behavior that wrecked a career many said was on a track for Governor of New York or Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
The obvious question is, How can men holding august office lose their wits so thoroughly? Yet, when we look closely at stories like Wachtler’s, Spitzer’s or Bill Clinton’s, we see that the collapse of their careers began with the most trivial of temptations – one drink too many, one coquettish glance, one indulgence of a minor vice. Who of us is so far from yielding to similar temptations that we can honestly say we would never set our feet on the same slippery path to self-destruction?
That’s a question that you will certainly ask when you read Wachtler’s memoir, After the Madness.
The exposure of a public figure is never pretty, but Wachtler’s was particularly humiliating. His arrest, conviction and incarceration for harassing his longtime lover precipitated a media feeding frenzy. And then he had to serve time with men he himself had judged from the highest legal chair in the state.
With unflinching honesty, Wachtler draws upon his unique experience of living life on both sides of the bench to paint a chilling portrait of prison life interwoven with a no-holds-barred analysis of the shortcomings of the American legal justice system.
No less a commentator than Tom Wolfe, author of Bonfire of the Vanities, wrote, “After The Madness is the riveting prison diary of one of the most powerful judges in America, a sure bet to succeed Mario Cuomo as governor of New York in 1995, who fell abruptly into the abyss of the criminal justice system, landing in ‘the hole’ in two federal prisons, and emerging from the lower depths at last to bring back fascinating observations about crime and punishment, many of them startling, some of them bitterly funny.”
- Richard Curtis
It is nearly impossible for a visitor to Italy to believe that this nation was an official enemy of the Allied forces in World War II. Of the three legs of the Germany-Japan-Italy Axis stool, Italy was the least belligerent. Its blustery dictator Mussolini was a tool of Adolf Hitler and when the war came to Italy, it was the German army that did the tough fighting.
The war came to Italy because it was clear to the Allied command that the most vulnerable place to launch an offensive against Germany was through Italy – the “soft underbelly” of the Axis in Winston Churchill’s famous phrase. A key thrust was the landing on the beaches of Anzio, some 33 miles south of Rome, and the fighting was vicious.
War historian T. R. Fehrenbach’s account of the assault, Anzio, brings the four month action to life with searing power. We had to take Anzio and we did, but at a terrible price.
The beautiful port town of Anzio has been awarded a “blue flag” for the quality of its beaches. But in 1943 the sand ran crimson.
– Richard Curtis
March 6, 2008—Wake Forest, North Carolina: Baen Books is proud to announce the launch of the inaugural list of E-Reads, now available at www.webscription.net. Titles will be published monthly, and will be available both individually and as part of a separate E-Reads program.
“E-Reads has been publishing topnotch fiction in electronic format for nearly a decade, and we’re delighted to offer them the opportunity to reach out to a whole new audience,” said Toni Weisskopf, Publisher of Baen Books. “With the likes of Greg Bear, Bill Dietz, Jim Gunn, Fritz Leiber and a host of other authors, our webscription readers are going to be thrilled with the titles we’ll be making available every month.”
Richard Curtis, Publisher of E-Reads, added, “We’re pleased to be distributing our titles with a fellow pioneer of electronic publishing, and look forward to a long and successful relationship.”
The inaugural list of titles includes:
For further information about individual titles, please visit: www.webscription.net
E-Reads is an industry pioneer in the electronic book business. Since 1999, they have published hundreds of predominantly out-of-print works in e-book format. Their list includes popular genres as science fiction, fantasy, romance, thrillers, horror and westerns, as well as general fiction and non-fiction.
Baen Books has been at the forefront of the electronic book business from its earliest inception, offering a wide variety of titles in multiple e-book formats, with innovative marketing programs such as eARCs, multi-title bundling and webscriptions.
It’s one thing to be a prophet without honor in one’s own country. It’s quite another to be a prophet without principles. Omar is the greatest storyteller the world has known – make that the greatest self-proclaimed storyteller the world has ever known. When his glib oracles work, he has the city at his feet. When they don’t, the city is at his throat.
Reaver Road and Hunter’s Haunt, Dave Duncan’s witty duo of novels, featuring the picaresque bard Omar are among my favorites of all his books and a good introduction to the first-rate list of Duncan novels carried by E-Reads.
– Richard Curtis
William Mulholland’s vision of an aqueduct to carry water from distant mountains and across trackless desert to the dusty little town of Los Angeles rivaled the visions of Rome’s engineers or the architects of China’s Great Wall. Indeed, Mulholland’s aqueduct was and to my knowledge still is the longest in the Western Hemisphere. Rivers in the Desert, the story of his inspiration and the execution of this amazing construction, is as stirring an adventure as any you will ever read, thanks to scholar Margaret Davis.
Amazon reviewer Michael Chadwick reminds us that “Fans of the movie Chinatown, Roman Polanski’s classic detective melodrama, will love this true account of how desperately needed water was brought hundreds of miles to Los Angeles,where growth in the early 20th century was rapidly outracing the city’s meager water supply. Like the 1974 movie with John Huston and Jack Nicholson, the real story has villains and heroes worthy of the big screen.”
– Richard Curtis
