In my life I have manned flight decks of aircraft carriers, swept floors as a janitor, adjusted insurance as an agent, overseen divisions as a manager, and taught English as a professor. I hold a PhD in English, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and, apart from travels in the navy, have lived in Arizona, Kansas, Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Germany, and The Netherlands. While the outward course of mys life took me afar, the inward course kept me near the same place as I circled back on central tenets—I hold no sword of orthodoxy but above all believe in human caring, conscience, kindness, self-control, self-responsibility, and respect for others.

Here are my books:


In a youthful America Richard Halliburton praised youth while a misfit, a rebel,who became wildly successful because of his wildly improbable life. He swam the Panama Canal as the S.S. Halliburton. He sailed across the Pacific in a Chinese junk. He starred in a 1930s Hollywood movie. He witnessed Japanese troops invading China. In an open-cockpit biplane he flew across the Sahara Desert to Timbuktu, looking for gasoline barrels hidden by the sand. His ship was boarded by pirates. He risked arrest in the 1930s Soviet Union and interviewed an assassin of Czar Nicholas and family, confirming what happened to the Royals, but few believed him. (But in 1979 Alexander Avdonin confirmed it.) A restless man, his energy drove him in search of new adrenalin highs. He was famous in his time, more than Amelia Earhart, and now he is forgotten. Of his fame he was humble enough to know he would become forgotten.

Don't Die in Bed: The Brief, Intense Life of Richard Halliburton can be found here.


In A Rose for Magdalena Cole Richter, a scientist, has a Near-Death Experience that changes his life. A catastrophic accident thrusts him into a world that blurs boundaries between life and death. In his NDE a mysterious figure asks him to find a letter while Richter doesn't want to return to life. But he must go back and accepts the request to find a letter written by his ancestor, a Civil War soldier to his wife. With that acceptance his spiritual journey begins. Left with an isolating sensitivity to another dimension he has insights and abilities that upset his prior understanding of reality. These revelations come at a cost. He grapples with them and begins a search he cannot explain to others. In the search he comes to understand the lives of others, kin he has never known and lost to memory.  As his experience becomes publicly known he is beset by skeptical challenges to both his position and his marriage. His is a lonely and troubled quest for validation. He is burdened with a knowledge challenged by disbelief of those around him. A Rose for Magdalena explores themes of isolation as Richter's abilities alienate him from the ordinary world. It is about the quest for understanding apart from a world that offers complacent explanations.

A Rose for Magdalena can be found here.





1928. Mexico. A lynching. A young Mormon, Cole Wilson, flees Chihuahua after witnessing a violence that shatters his faith and leaves him burdened by moral debt. He arrives in Prohibition-era New York seeking honest work and finds himself immersed in the crime, speakeasies, and social upheaval of the Jazz Age. To briefly escape it all he learns to fly, soaring above the city, a skill that carries into the skies over Spain and the Himalayas.

At a Greenwich Village zendo led by a Japanese Zen master, Cole meets Della, an artist born to privilege and is invited into the world of her wealthy relatives, Aunt Lisa and Uncle Fitzhugh. Their unlikely love is tested as Cole’s conscience draws him into dangerous acts of penance involving unions, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War. The love between Cole and Della is a relationship tested through the years by Cole's demons.

As history darkens, friends are scattered across the globe, with Anne, a Buddhist woman, making a devastating choice to save her lover, Jack. Another friend, Ramsey Lawrence, runs parallel to Cole's struggle. He seeks peace rather than penance, moving from Japanese Zen monasteries to Indian ashrams and Christian monasteries in rural Kentucky. Their paths reflect two ways of confronting suffering in a violent century.

Framed by a 1979 interview of Cole as an old man in the deserts of Chihuahua, Redemption is a sweeping historical novel of love and war, spiritual reckoning, and the long echo of moral choices made in youth.

Redemption can be found here.



In 1914 Malcolm Cummings Grow did not know he would become the first surgeon general of The United States Air Force.  He did not know that World War I would erupt that year.  He did not know that he would join the Czar's army and go to the Russian front.  He did not know that the Czar would be assassinated and Lenin then Stalin would take power. He could not foresee World War II when he would design  safety gear for aerial combat crews--gear found in Hollywood movies, the inventor unnamed. When a regimental surgeon here is his account of meeting the Czar on the front lines:

The Emperor . . . was dressed in the ordinary field uniform with the insignia of a colonel on his shoulder-straps. . . .

He came up to Colonel Kalpaschnecoff, saluted, shook hands, and addressed a few friendly words to him in Russian, and passed on to where [Grow] stood with [his] hand to [his] cap in salute.” General Pleshcoff introduced him. "Our new American doctor, Your Imperial Highness!"

"American doctor!" repeated the Emperor in perfect English, a kindly smile lighting up his face. "And you have come over here all the way from America to help our wounded?" he asked.

Surgeon Grow: An American in The Russian Fighting can be found here.