LURAY
A young man from the steel-mill and coal country of western Pennsylvania accepts his first job to teach high-school English in a small northwestern Virginia county, home of the famous Luray Caverns. During his first four months, Tom finds a place to live—a motel cabin—owned by Becky, a widow with two daughters: Ronnie, a high-school senior, and Sandi, the older daughter. He develops friendships with a handful of teachers who become the Lunch Bunch as he is learning and refining his skills as a teacher. Tom slowly becomes enmeshed in a developing mystery surrounding his assigned teacher-mentor. Tom also finds himself falling deeply in love: with teaching and with a troubled young woman. Set among the beautiful mountains of the Blue Ridge, where seemingly endless summer is replaced by spectacular autumn colors, where friendly and easy-going Southerners make great food and sell homey antiques, LURAY is a story that takes the reader into the classroom of a first-year teacher and into his life. In addition, the food is good and the environment is stunningly beautiful.
BLUE RIDGE HIGH
Take a trip into the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to experience a passionate love story. Take the moments that come alive in a high-school classroom and beyond, and then season them heavily with suspense and attempted murder and you have BLUE RIDGE HIGH, which picks up where Ed Buhrer’s LURAY left off, but with a hard right turn into something different. In this novel, as Tom continues to fall deeper and deeper into love with two demanding mistresses—Sandi and teaching—there’s a lot to laugh about, a lot to sigh about…but then, with a jolt, something will happen to make you think, “Hey, this isn’t funny anymore—this is scary!” BLUE RIDGE HIGH is filled with colorful and memorable characters—real people who act and sound real—a sense of place made alive with dazzling description, and a true glimpse into a real high school…and for an added treat, a few good lessons in cooking. It also has the ability to take the reader into the story and make him want to stay there. BLUE RIDGE HIGH has something to offer every reader, from romance to intrigue, to insights into the lives of teachers, to good food, good recipes, and laughter, to the desire to fall in love all over again. You won’t be sorry you read this novel.
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET NIXON AND EISENHOWER: Baby Boomer Tales from the New Jersey Suburbs
Growing up in New Jersey: Land of Toxic Waste Dumps...Home to the Homeless Garbage Barges of the Seven Seas...state that actually wants to fight over who owns Staten Island... maybe the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa...butt of jokes from stand-up comedians so bad that no one laughs at them (the comedians or the jokes)...Lower Intestinal Tract of America to anyone who has ever had to drive up (or down) the Jersey Turnpike...Usurper of Rhode Island's former right to be "The Most Densely Populated State"...and on and on. New Jersey wasn’t always like that.
When I was a boy in America’s adolescence of the Fifties, it was different; when I was a young man, it was still different. New Jersey: The Garden State...Land of Deep Valleys and Pristine Snow-covered Peaks...Home of Rolling Hills and Wildflowers...tiny villages of white church steeples and bounteous orchards...mile on mile of white-sand beaches and underground caverns...quiet and uncrowded two-lane highways...wind-swept forests of snow-covered redwood, birch, and date palm...and...
Okay, it was never totally like that, either, but it was still a pretty good place to grow up. Today’s young people will be amazed at our generation. We were innocents: innocent of sex and other adult wonders; and we were adventurers: our thumbs could take us to places our feet couldn’t. We rode our bikes everywhere – without pads or helmets; we could not only swim in the streams, we could drink from them. We witnessed one of the greatest inventions of the century: Pez. Well, some historian might say it was the Sputnik that kicked off the race for space, but I recall that practically every kid in America had a Pez dispenser in his pocket; I don’t remember any of us with a Sputnik! We ran home, dropped our “school” clothes, and ran back outside to play…our games, not ones manufactured for us with tons of batteries and imbedded computer chips in them. The seasons all held something special; you could go to the movies all day for fifty cents and still have enough left over for an ice-cream cone on the way home. And we were all part of a truly remarkable moment: Jonas Salk cured us of the terrifying fear of polio..and Nixon tried, but didn’t quite cure us of the terrifying fear (thanks to McCarthy and weekly air-raid drills) of evil Communists.
It’s not like that anymore…is it? And it’s not just about New Jersey, after all, it’s about growing up in the new suburbs in the new, post-war America. All of these times are captured, humorously, in my 80,000-word memoir, ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET NIXON AND EISENHOWER: Baby Boomer Tales from the New Jersey Suburbs, a journey that will take baby boomers back to their childhoods and younger readers back to a simpler and more innocent time, starring a recurring cast of juvenile characters roaming the environs of school and neighborhood. I envision an audience of both late adolescents and adults, anyone who understands the importance of tradition and family. It will be of interest to the huge audience of baby boomers (such as the author himself) who are looking to revisit their own adolescences, now that they have time in their retirements to go back to the enjoyment of reading.
ONLY: Growing Up Alone
Growing up has never been easy, with parents and teachers and bullies and friends who aren't friends two days later. Dark, shadowy monsters that inhabit your bedroom at night can be frightening. Growing up alone, as an only child, with no one to share these fears with, really stinks. ONLY is about a kind of growing up that takes place as much in the inner thoughts of a child as in what he hears from the "others" in his life that are often a great deal fewer than in the lives of those kids who grow up in larger families. ONLY is a story of that only child who had a “brother”--the ideal child that his parents expected when he popped out of the womb and slid, slippery, into the delivering doctor's gloved hands, the child who would, of course, get all A's in school and never lie. For this “only,” life was hard when this ideal son was always there, living in that same house, to constantly remind the parents that their actual "only" wasn't quite what they had hoped for in their only attempt at parenthood. Most of all, ONLY is the story of one such "only," desperately wishing for a brother, while experiencing the sometimes funny, sometimes joyful, often painful, and without doubt, poignant moments of growing up in the middle years prior to the invasion of puberty and the awareness of self in its most pervasively adolescent manifestations.
And finally, a brother appears -- one that only two kids know about -- who gives this lonely only child a real “brother”…for a while, anyway.
SHAG SUMMER: An Adolescent Odyssey
Imagine getting your first job, as a caddy, and heading to Pennsylvania for your sixteenth summer…and coming home taller, naïve no longer, and completely and totally aware of what it means to be intimate with the opposite sex…and in love. SHAG SUMMER is set at a Pocono Mountains resort in the summer of 1962, the summer of sixteen-year-old Freddie Fielding’s sexual awakening, but it is more than just a coming-of-age story; it is a “growing up” epic, filled with a great deal of humor, tasteful sex, detailed description, realistic dialogue, and unforgettable characters, many the golfers that Freddie meets in his two-and-a-half months of caddying. This novel is for an audience of readers who like a happy ending with all loose ends neatly tied up, people who love to laugh, and anyone who has ever fallen in love.
THE DEVIL IN THE PINES – A Handy Boys Adventure
Off on a camping trip and search for buried Revolutionary War gold in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, the Handy boys, Dan and Stan -- along with some chums, one cousin, and a hound dog -- are soon caught up in two cases that their famous detective father, Fosdick Handy, is working on with a combined task force of local and federal agents. Both sinister and supernatural forces will be at work as the boys try to get through one more exciting and unbelievable adventure after another, all the while trying to make sure they get home in time for dinner!
THE GREAT CHICKEN TERROR – A Handy Boys Adventure
A group of foreign terrorists, led by the incredibly evil Assoma bin Reqtaam, is intent on wreaking havoc on the American economy by destroying all the fried-chicken franchises with the introduction of a foreign species of chicken whose flesh has the consistency of a Goodyear® tire. But this is just the beginning of their evil plan to destroy the American way of life and bring chaos to the country. It will be up to the Handy Boys – Stan and Dan – their handful of faithful chums, and some unexpected allies to foil the diabolical plans of Assoma bin Reqtaam and his fanatical followers as our heroes venture from their home in East South Keansbury, New Jersey, on mad dashes back and forth across the Garden State.
CRITTERSVILLE: A Parable of Good and Not-so-Good
CRITTERSVILLE is a fantasy about a town of various animal species who have learned to co-exist and live together in relative harmony, unlike the humans who had destroyed themselves, along with less desirable tenants of the earth, such as mosquitoes, cockroaches, and politicians. The “relative harmony” has been maintained by the various creatures establishing “neighborhoods,” thus we see the felines living together, the birds and canines doing the same in their sections of Crittersville. This harmony, however, becomes threatened, as will the entire town of Crittersville, by the arrival of a terrifying creature -- a griffin -- and an evil wizard who controls it. It will take the united efforts of all the members of Crittersville and a couple unlikely heroes to rid the town of this terrible threat.
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