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Low & Outside
The only book I've written strictly from a tape recording. An old boyfriend of my wife's was in the Phillies organization, getting up to Triple-A three times but not quite making it to the Biggies. He had some funny stories to tell, so I sat him down in front of a jug of wine and a tape recorder and let him talk about his career in the minor leagues. It was one of the first adult baseball books, and my agent at the time, Perry Knowlton of Curtis-Brown Ltd., sold it immediately to Coward-McCann. Also my first TV appearance -- on the "Today" show, no less!
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The Fortec Conspiracy
My friend Dick Garvin, the world's greatest collaborator, had long been fascinated by a rumor about a UFO crash in Norway. We decided to write a documentary about it but changed our minds and produced our first novel instead. Hard cover, sold to paperback.
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The Talbott Agreement
My turn to be fascinated, this time by the sci-fi concept of telekinesis, because of a scientist I knew at Sylvania who found a fellow who could bend a laser beam with his mind. Dick and I turned it into the second novel, a spy thriller set in Red China. Hard cover again, also sold to paperback.
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The Midnight Special
I met Ray Bradbury, a boyhood hero, at a sci-fi convention and he told me always to write something "different." Driving to an advertising client, Dick Garvin told me about an old black folk music legend named Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, so we decided to write a biographical novel about him, instead of another thriller. For research, we took a grand tour of East Texas and Louisiana, visiting prisons and black neighborhoods, and ultimately discovered Leadbelly's near-forgotten gravesite in a cemetery behind the Shiloh church in Mooringsport. It's now a Louisiana historical monument. This was published by Bernard Geis Associates two weeks before he filed for bankruptcy. The book sold out its first printing, but the distributor couldn't order more copies. Even a great half-page NYTBR review couldn't save it. I'm trying to interest someone in re-publishing it, but no luck so far.
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Inside Divorce — Is It What You Really Want?
My friend Bob Burger (an international chess master who once beat Bobby Fisher in 13 moves) and I surveyed 1,000 divorced people, which the Ladies' Home Journal called the largest survey of divorced people ever taken (at the time). It turned out most of them said if they had it to do all over again they'd try harder to stay married! So Bob and I wrote a pro-marriage divorce book and got the great Melvin Belli to write the introduction. Chilton published the hardback and serial rights made some good money.
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Why Our Children Drink
As the Vietnam War was winding down, I wanted to write a book about the growing teenage drug problem, and my editor at Prentice-Hall suggested doing one instead on the LEGAL teenage drug – alcohol. My wife, a psychiatric R.N., and I did the shocking research and wrote this book together. I hated the title but lost the argument with the publisher. But we had a lot of fun on the TV/lecture circuit.
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Biotonics — 6-Second Exercises That Really Work
I wrote this with my friend Dr. Rex E. Wiederanders, a midwestern surgeon, and Cosmopolitan did a nice spread on it with Cindy Williams as the model. Funk & Wagnall's published.
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EgoSpeak — Why No One Listens To You
This grew out of a term paper I did in college about how everyone seems to be rehearsing what he wants to say next instead of listening to the other guy speak. Bob Burger and I expanded it into a book, also published by Chilton, which sold to Bantam paperback for big bucks and eventually became required reading in the psychology curricula of several big name universities.
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Mega-Nutrition
I was getting heavy into nutrition and Linus Pauling's vitamin C theories and wrote this with the head of the Orthomolecular Medical Society. My name isn't on the cover because I almost had a nervous breakdown writing it with this brilliant but highly frustrating character, and before he drove me totally nutso I turned the final manuscript over to Bob Burger. The McGraw-Hill hardback did fairly well.
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The Conquest of Cancer
I've always thought this book justifies my life on earth. I wrote it with Dr. Virginia Livingston-Wheeler, who, at the time, was achieving higher than an 80 percent cure rate for all types of cancer with a vaccine made from a bacterium she had discovered. But she and the American Cancer Society were like the mongoose and the cobra, so every time a TV or radio show wanted to interview us the ACS threatened to sue them. However, the book, published by Franklin-Watts, did very well. After she died, newly "discovered" treatments similar to her theories came out of the woodwork. I'm writing an updated edition, including my personal experiences and observations working with Dr. Virginia and currently accepted "new" treatments derived from her work.
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