"Bernice and John" is part memoir and part post-WWII Oklahoma history, and in a sense national history, through the eyes of two people who lived and worked in Oklahoma City. My father was a petroleum geologist; he illustrates the life of a young man who comes to maturity in the Great Depression and chooses to become a professional oil man, a choice heavily influenced by the Oklahoma oil boom, and who is just starting his career as WWII begins. My mother was an extremely intelligent person ...

TUSKERS is an explosive combination of sci-fi, college football, humor, and satire that will keep you wondering seriously about the social impact of this game we all follow so closely and emotionally. TUSKERS takes place on the day of a football game between the University of Nebraska and the University of Oklahoma in the year 2090. Nebraska has not lost a game in ten years, but must win this last one to complete the perfect Winning Decade. Global warming has turned the American central pl...

Outwitting College Professors is the ultimate college success book. This valuable little volume tells everything you need to know, from how profs make out exams, to how you should act if you encounter your prof in a bar, tips for maximizing grades on papers, advice on handling your relationships with the most difficult profs (in a chapter named "Advanced Outwitting"!), and ways to get great letters of recommendation. For over four decades, college students have used these tricks on the aut...

CONVERSATIONS is clearly satire, humor, and borderline science fiction, although the satire is relatively soft, the humor is somewhat subtle, and the science fiction is completely consistent with what you'd expect from two eternal beings, one of whom is supposed to have created the universe. Instead of dealing with the age-old, and quite frankly rather hackneyed, subject of God and Satan discussing Job, Conversations is a highly modern version that addresses a wide range of subjects. God h...

In the United States today, four words are political hot buttons that no elected official in his or her right mind responds to with deep and honest understanding, although all respond in ways that seem to reveal strong beliefs they hope are congruent with those of the voting majority. These words are: homosexuality, abortion, immigration, and evolution. For all four words, and the areas of daily life they refer to, Americans' levels of education and religious affiliations drive political o...

Africa Notes addresses the following question: How are exceptional travel experiences, especially ones taken to realize life-long dreams, not only integrated into your memories, but also informed by your past experiences, your knowledge, and your values? In this sense, the book's theme is transferable to other aspects of human lives as well as to experiences that are not necessarily chosen but nevertheless have a major impact on our personal futures. There is plenty of biology in Africa No...

Delmar Stevens, obscenely rich oil baron with rigs and drilling platforms throughout the world, is obsessed with theoretical research by an obscure, and now dead, woman scientist at a small college in Iowa, research he believes will give him the power to generate massive earthquakes, or set off equally massive volcanoes, at selected places on Earth. Caught up in this obsession with a potential weapon of mass destruction are a suite of characters, including scientists, detectives from the I...

Dr. Gideon Marshall is a geology prof at an obscenely wealthy liberal arts college in Iowa, and he gets called as an expert witness for trials where crime scene dirt is critical evidence. The series can be thought of as a five-book essay on scientific literacy, or maybe the lack thereof, given what some of the characters would like to do with a murder victim's theoretical research, namely convert fracking technology into a weapon of mass destruction by making earthquakes happen on purpose ...

In despair over his nation sliding into authoritarian rule, an 82-year old scientist writes a letter to a new-born child whose name he's just read in the paper. His nation is the United States; his letter is what life has taught him about what this child can expect if she lives to her own 82nd birthday on March 21, 2100, during a global pandemic and our ongoing assault on the American Dream by people elected to preserve that dream and make it achievable for all. The letter takes two years ...

Outwitting College Professors is the ultimate college success book. This valuable little volume tells everything you need to know, from how profs make out exams, to how you should act if you encounter your prof in a bar, tips for maximizing grades on papers, advice on handling your relationships with the most difficult profs (in a chapter named "Advanced Outwitting"!), and ways to get great letters of recommendation. For over four decades, college students have used these tricks on the aut...

PIECES OF THE PLAINS addresses the questions: Why do people decide to study nature? What do we learn from nature? How does our understanding of nature develop? And finally, what does a scientist's lifetime of interaction with our planet, and especially with the multitude of organisms that share Earth with us, tell us about our future? The setting is America's heartland, our literal geographic center: the prairie landscape from Oklahoma to Nebraska. Characters range from a dying grandmother...

The Ginkgo is a story about the conflict between tradition and creativity. Creativity is symbolized by a girl who comes to a major university from an isolated ranch on the high plains; tradition is symbolized by the classmates she left behind. The girl comes of intellectual age through study of a single ginkgo tree, and her detailed letters to her teacher, as she explores a museum, a sculpture garden, and an art gallery. In the end, she writes a visionary cult-piece about America, a thousa...