Favorites

Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder
This is a fatastic read for both for story-lovers and techno geeks.  It's a *must* if you love the sea, or dream of finding lost treasure!

Catch-22 
I love Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. While some people find the humor too absurd, it is the whole pointof  the story, that truth can be absurd, horrific and funny all at the same time. FYI, don't bother with the movie. In life, there is comedy and tragedy, ... and there is life & love in both comedy and tragedy.

The Stand 
Stephen King's The Stand is a fantastic novel.  Unfortunately, there have been so many similarly themed doomsday movies and books over the years that The Stand now feels almost cliche. If you can put yourself into the book and forget the other copy-cats, you will absolutely love it

Nor Crystal Tears and Ice Rigger
Alan Dean Foster's sci-fi novels are great! He has a style similar to Ursula K. Leguin. You don't read one of his books, you experience it right along side the characters. The character development is so good that you can't wait to sink your teeth into a sequel to see what happens next.  I guess the followers of sci-fi fantasy books feel this way, but after The Lord of the Rings and Sword of Shanara, I felt like I had read them all, not so with ADF! He has also adpated many movies into books.  If you're an Aliens or Star Trek movie fan, then you are already an ADF fan!

Athabasca by Alistair MacLean --of course, everything of his is great!
If you enjoy mystery and/or techno-thrillers, check-out anything from Alistair MacLean. He filled that Tom Clancy niche before there was a Tom Clancy.

Raise the Titanic by Clive Cussler 
Clive Cussler, one of the best spy vs. spy writers that eventually overdid it and made his last dozen or more books from the same boilerplate. Read one of his first five or six, and you'll enjoy a winner. I read Raise The Titanic when it came out in the 1970's. People really wondered if it was possible to find the Titanic, and here was a guy raising it to the surface and showing us secrets we never imagined --very cool!

Jaws by Peter Benchly 
Peter Benchly's Jaws will keep you out of the water in your tub, it's just that scarey! On film the Kitner boy simply  disappears, but in the book ...well, you'll just need to read it yourself, if you dare!

Essentials

We Almost Lost Detroit by John G. Fuller 
How bad can nuclear power be?! Other than making tons of highly radioactive material that we have no method for disposing of, what's the problem?! The waste is barely the tip of the iceberg. Read this for some really scarey facts!


The Day We Bombed Utah by John G. Fuller 
Do want your HealthCare run by the same people who can't run the Post office? Read what happened to areas across the entire country as a result of nuclear bomb tests in the New Mexico desert. This is what happens when you play with something deadly but  don't even remotely understand!

Biography of Captain James Cook 
Since I enjoy stories of the early explorers --the only part of history I really absorbed like a sponge, the Biography of Capt. James Cook just amazed me. But, you don't need to be a history buff to enjoy this book. It's full of actual historical facts that is just mind blowing.

Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Anyone who has read this book will instantly find it a favorite. While it has a disturbing dark side, the author actually sends you back in time to when the U.S. was still evolving as a global force and our ingenuity was decades ahead of the rest of the world. You will meet historic characters and learn about aspects of American culture as though you were actually living with them in 1892!

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