The Blood Cries Out
Teenager's Death on the Wall is Still Remembered Almost 50 Years Later
Two teenage boys made a mad dash out of a deserted building, and the guards opened fire with automatic weapons from about fifty...
The 9th Worst Car of All Time!
The Puzzle People and the Trouble with Trabis
The votes are in, and East Germany's Trabant has been named the 9th worst car of all time, according to Edmunds.com. Much of my new novel, The...
1989: The Year That Changed the World
Big Brother Takes a Big Hit in 1989
George Orwell didn't quite get it right. His landmark novel, 1984, describes the 1980s as a time in which Big Brother is all-seeing and all-controlling. Little did...
Swords and Plowshares in the Heart of Berlin
When I was writing my novel The Puzzle People, I came across a photo of the Church of Reconciliation as it was being blown up in 1985 (shown on the left). But what caught...
All Along the Watchtower
Berlin Trip Takes Me to the Site of the First Shooting Along the Wall
Talk about timing.
I spent the last two weeks in Austria and Berlin, in part to do research for my new novel...
Location, Location, Location: Doing Novel Research On-Site
NOTE—An earlier blog, Doing Your Research Right, discussed my research habits when writing historical novels. This is a follow-up blog.
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I guess I should have known what day it was when I showed...
Canton Comes Through Again
One of the highlights of 2011 was the One Book, One Community program in Canton, Ohio, which adopted The Disappearing Man as its featured book. The Canton Repository newspaper continues its support with a...
Wind of Change
One of the great things about researching my novel, The Puzzle People, was that I could go to Youtube and see videos taken of the Berlin Wall as it went up in 1961 and then came...
