Adventure books by Erich Eipert— for those young (and maybe not so young) adults who enjoy action, young heroes, wry humor, a real plot, and a touch of romance.
Guy Going Under. Guy just wanted to win over a girl a little beyond his reach. He didn’t plan to get himself, and a girl he couldn’t stand, trapped in a cave with a gruesome historical secret. Kindle version or paperback.
Butterfly Powder and the Mountains of Iowa. Meet Gilbert Perles, a rural Iowa underachiever in the 1960′s, and a hero too. Kindle version or paperback.
I’m beginning to think the answer to the question posed in my title is “no.” At least in the West within a thousand miles of LA. After leaving Movie Flats in the Alabama Hills, the lovely but surreal setting of the Trona Pinnacles became my next camping destination. The pinnacles are located on the playa of Searles Dry Lake in the Searles Valley, just one valley west of Death Valley National Park in this harsh basin and range country. If you read my earlier post on the Bennett-Arcan wagon train party’s 1849 escape from Death Valley, it might interest you to know that another party became trapped in Death Valley about the same time. The Jayhawkers abandoned their wagons as well and walked out by way of Searles Valley. They acted to save themselves from a situation of their own making, so they were only heroes in a limited way. Yet even this marginal heroism beat what followed after this place too became a popular filming location, like Movie Flats. The cameras here weren’t shooting good guys shooting outlaws and Indians. The cinematography was of a different type. Continue reading →
I just spent a couple of days camping in and hiking through hero country. No, it wasn’t a battlefield. And yet it was. If that sounds contradictory, it should become clear shortly. It is a princely place if you’re drawn to southwest high desert country like I am. This tract of land is situated near Lone Pine, California and is in the Alabama Hills, a name which has nothing at all to do with Alabama. The area has it all: sun, sagebrush, cactus, canyons, and jumbles of huge golden boulders. If that isn’t enough, topping it off is the grand mountain vista backdrop of Mt. Whitney and its surrounding high Sierra peaks. I’d better confess right here that I’m not the first to notice the ultra-western-ness of these features. The Hollywood movie industry noticed it 90 years ago. Continue reading →
Helicopter drops grunts in landing zone. U.S. Army photograph. Public domain.
Authors writing from personal experience about combat know that conveying their experience is ultimately an impossible task. The chasm between those who lived the trauma in a place like Vietnam, or some other version of Vietnam in another war, and those merely reading about it is nearly unbridgeable with mere words or images. But like many other veterans before him, John Podlaski tries to do just that in his book, Cherries: A Vietnam War Novel. And in this basic mission he successfully describes what Vietnam was like for some. I have to say some because in a war where the vast majority of those in uniform served as support personnel, most of the hardship fell on those few actually in the field. But more about that later. Continue reading →
Saying we face many political and economic problems in America—problems that appear overwhelming—seems like an understatement. But then along comes a book that puts things in perspective and reminds us how good we really have it when compared to people in certain other places in the world. Appropriately enough, I finished reading such a book just before Thanksgiving Day. The book is Escape From Camp14, by Blaine Harden. No one in the US, no matter whether they are incarcerated or just dirt poor, is forced to dig up frozen human waste each winter with bare hands, then chop it up and spread it on fields. But it’s a fact of life in North Korea, Harden informs. Continue reading →
Our unmatched ability to conceive, make, and use tools is something that sets Homo sapiens apart from all other species. The use of tools is easy enough to picture in factories, repair shops, kitchens, and home workbenches, for the primary definition of the word is usually: an implement, especially one held in the hand, as a hammer, saw, or file, for performing or facilitating mechanical operations (dictionary.reference.com).
But the definition of the word doesn’t stop there. Today the word is just as often used in a broader way: an item or implement used for a specific purpose. A tool can be …a technical object such as a web authoring tool or software program…a concept can also be considered a tool (businessdictionary.com). In other words, tools can also have intellectual components and be applied to intellectual pursuits.
With humans being wired the way they are, progressive or competitive people are driven to devise or seek out the best possible tools. Let me now defer to a definition from a website for this type of person, Cool Tools. Its definition of a cool tool is: …anything useful that is superior to comparable items. The constant search for such tools is a component of, and a major driver of, science and technology. I am no longer a scientist, but the idea remains ingrained in me and I recognize that even selling books requires modern tools. Hence, the book trailer below. I won’t go so far as to claim it is the ultimate cool tool, but have a look! And Cool Tools is well worth a look, too.
I recently spent three weeks camping in Death Valley National Park. There, when not hiking canyons, I basked in the pleasant—well, hot—temperatures and eased into a languid “I kind of like just doin’ nothing, it’s something that I do” sort of existence (description courtesy of a Robert Earl Keen song—Something I Do). Continue reading →
Yes, my new novel, Guy Going Under: A Cave Adventure, is now out there. It, like the bookshelf it rests on, is virtual and can be purchased as a Kindle eBook at Amazon.com. The paperback version should become available soon.
As an adolescent, I was taken with Tom Sawyer’s cave adventure because I grew up near the Mississippi River in southeast Iowa, not too far north of Hannibal, Missouri. I suppose Mark Twain’s story first planted the idea of writing my own cave tale. Yes, it took me a few decades to make it happen, but I did do it. My tale is set in the Pacific Northwest rather than in the Midwest; Seattle plays a part, but most of the action takes place on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. Or maybe I should say under the Olympic Peninsula, since this a cave story. I’ll have a little more to say about the actual story in a follow-up post.
