Inescapable nonfiction and escape fiction
World War II narrative history
The circumstances of geography that placed East European ethnic Germans Maria and Fidel Eipert on the losing side during World War II resulted in painful experiences that etched themselves into their souls. The trauma would never be forgotten by either—not in postwar shattered Germany where the pair later met nor on the Iowa farm where they rebuilt their lives in America. The eventful and brutal things they and others in their lost homelands endured would have gone with them to the grave had not their stories cried out to be told.
A multi-decade accumulation of interviews, site visits, and historical research by the author, the couple’s son, coalesced into two companion narratives, The Secret She Carried and now By Accident of Geography. These books follow the lives of Maria and Fidel, as each became involuntarily bound to Hitler’s Third Reich in their formerly Austrian homeland areas of the Czech Sudetenland and the Banat plain of Romania. Their lives and the lives of those around them changed radically when they were forced to live the viciousness rather than merely follow it by newspaper and radio. The chronicles of their experiences put the reader in the shoes of ordinary soldiers and civilians who had to summon the resilience needed to survive the fearsome challenges of Hitler’s Third Reich and Stalin’s cruel postwar occupation.
Fiction
Books for young or not-so-young adults who relish adventure, youthful heroes, wry humor, a real plot, and a pinch of romance.paperbacks or ebooks through bookstores, Amazon or other outlets.
Butterfly Powder and the Mountains of Iowa. In 1960s rural Iowa, meet underachiever and improbable hero Gilbert Perles, the train he comes to call his own, an alluring girl named Alice, and the rival he would later re-encounter in a new and unexpected setting—war-torn Vietnam.
Guy Going Under. Guy just wanted to win a girl a little beyond his reach. He didn’t plan to get himself, and a too-smart girl he couldn’t stand, trapped in a cave with a gruesome historical secret.