Non-Fiction Books

The world today is a complex place, and quality of life-yours and your family's-is more important than ever. The chance of getting saddled with pitfalls has never been greater. Congestion, crime, greed, immorality, and indecency top the list of ills that exist in far too many locales in this country. Overwhelming bureaucracy, unseen loopholes, and outright deceit are valid concerns in any real estate transaction. You simply can't afford to buy a home blindly. To avoid the pitfalls that plague far too many places, you need to arm yourself with as much information as possible. Safe & Sound-How to Buy A Safe, Private, Quiet Home is designed to do just that. Written by a veteran law enforcement officer, Safe & Sound is chock full of vital home buying information that doesn't exist elsewhere. In four vital categories-security, road and traffic safety, nuisances, and catastrophe precautions-Safe & Sound identifies hundreds of quality of life variables involved in the purchase of a home, including a host of things you won't notice, your real estate agent won't think of or inform you about, and the sellers of the home won't-and aren't required-to tell you.

Soft Targets and Crowded Places (ST-CP)—hotels, movie theaters, nightclubs, school buses, shopping malls, ski/ride resorts, and summer camps—is a comprehensive insightful analysis of where we’ve been, where we’re at, and where we need to go, as it pertains to incidents, described as all those horrible ruthless acts of violence that have happened in America lately, including mass shootings, that have ripped our country apart with no foreseeable end in sight. From “Columbine” to “Sandy Hook” to “Parkland;” from “Pulse” to “Route 91 Harvest” to “Thousand Oaks;” and all those before, in between, and after; the bloodshed has been nothing short of horrendous. Before delving into the core content of the book it takes a close look at several perpetrators of previous high-profile incidents so readers can better understand what makes them tick and the results are nothing short of fascinating. While these mental autopsies are both factual and useful, they read like juicy crime dramas, probing the minds of perpetrators of incidents past for solutions to prevent future incidents. Even those with considerable insightfulness about the perpetrators of incidents will be in awe of their mindsets from long before they pulled the trigger to just minutes before they opened fire. The book definitively pinpoints the significant progress we’ve made responding to incidents and provides readers with solid hope that the perpetrators of incidents, our somewhat newfound domestic enemies, responsible for spilling far too much blood on American soil can be defeated—because surprisingly we’ve very recently been there and done just that. The book takes a long hard look at the solutions we’ve already applied to prevent incidents, some of them nothing more than band aids and others nothing short of all-inclusive. The book analyzes some traditional solutions, both those that have been implemented and those which need to have been completed yesterday, and it suggests a variety of exceedingly novel solutions that will astound you. The book doesn’t dwell in the past but takes lessons from it, while looking closely at our future, at those last bastions of freedom and openness—the so called Soft Targets and Crowded Places (ST-CP)—hotels, movie theaters, nightclubs, school buses, shopping malls, ski/ride resorts, and summer camps. The book conducts a microscopic examination of the vulnerabilities of seven categories of Soft Targets and Crowded Places (ST-CP) in America—hotels, movie theaters, nightclubs, school buses, shopping malls, ski/ride resorts, and summer camps—and what we can and so desperately need to do to harden them. The author gives the softest of the Soft Targets and Crowded Places (ST-CP), the virgin and highly vulnerable ski/ride resorts, the closest scrutiny, and the best solutions. For the naysayers that contend all is well with these seven categories of venues, a careful examination of many like venues, using New England as a well-justified microcosm, prove them unfailingly wrong. The book is a blueprint, a primer, a way forward for those at the helm of all the Soft Targets and Crowded Places (ST-CP)—hotels, movie theaters, nightclubs, school buses, shopping malls, ski/ride resorts, and summer camps—and a fascinating account for any reader into these high risk venues. Will these soft target venues that are the stomping grounds—past and present—for most of us, be places we’ll steer clear of in the future? It’s quickly becoming apparent that will be the case. The deciding factors of where we go won’t be the traditional things like proximity and offerings of destinations—it’s going be are they safe—and the consequence of venues deemed unsafe will thwart business profitability. Finally, the book includes a fascinating case study with the centerpiece being the mass shooting at a “San Ysidro McDonald's” which, among other startling facts, makes it abundantly clear that the often leveled charge that “Trump” incites violence is nothing but pure hogwash.

Predominantly set in Jonesboro, in the part of Maine the natives call Downeast, Dogs - A Tragic and True Saga of Hoarding and Colossal Government Failure Exacerbated by a Complete Collapse of Governmental Oversight in Downeast Maine is a saga that chronicles the extreme state of lawlessness and the gross dereliction of duty by the powers that were in 2001 and 2002 mostly as it pertains to up to 28 dogs. It’s the story of John H. Hughes Jr., who was born and mostly reared in Brooklyn, New York. Hughes graduated from fine Catholic schools where mostly Mercy Nuns at Saint Jerome School and Xaverian Brothers at Nazareth High School maintained nothing but the highest standards of academic and behavioral excellence. Hughes was an active card-carrying member of the iconic Flatbush Boys Club where among other things he was a Boy Scout who attained the rank of Star, the third highest. Apparently, the result of a life changing traumatic brain injury (TBI) Hughes received as a teenager, something changed in early adulthood, and not for the better. Hughes started a freefall that would culminate in him leaving Florida, where he lived most of his adult life, in an old motorhome with a hoard of dogs and a cache of 37 guns. His destination was Downeast Maine. Hughes wandered aimlessly around Washington County in Downeast Maine, living in poverty and extreme squalor, and skipping meals so he could buy food for his brood of dogs. The motorhome was so laden with dog urine and feces that it leaked out from the sides of the vehicle. Hughes was moved along by the police dozens of times—reportedly 35 times—but they never intervened in a meaningful way. Not once. When the dogs had apparently ripped out and chewed through a lot of the motorhome’s interior wiring, disabling the vehicle, Hughes is forced to settle on 3.48 acres, more or less, of heavily wooded land in a very remote area which lacked all utilities. He let the dogs loose and they began roaming at large in packs where daily, from sunrise to sunset and beyond, neighborhood people were housebound or at grave risk and wildlife was being chased, wounded, and killed. It continued for 81 continuous hellish days with government doing next to nothing to stop it despite desperate pleas to do something. The Town of Jonesboro allowed Hughes to live in a mobile home that was, according to Maine Revised Statues, a clearly defined dangerous building. That building would be where he died in a fire in late November 2002. Less than a week later his remaining dogs, seven at the time, were massacred, which was ordered by a high-ranking state official when a very botched plan to euthanize them failed miserably. The dogs were shot to death with a .45 caliber handgun by a state humane agent, and when he was overcome with emotion and unable to continue a civilian finished the job. The dogs were buried side-by-side in a mass grave with a backhoe in the very place they died. But the extreme state of lawlessness and the gross dereliction of duty by the powers that were didn’t happen by happenstance in Jonesboro, it was, by all accounts, by design—a well-orchestrated approach advocated by the longtime town clerk of Jonesboro, who seemed fearful of John Hughes to an inhuman like extreme. Her husband and one of her bosses, a selectman in the Town of Jonesboro, failed to provide much needed oversight. The animal control officer (ACO) for the Town of Jonesboro, also so fearful of Hughes she refused to do much of anything about his dogs, the know everything but do nearly nothing town constable for the Town of Jonesboro, and three State of Maine officials who failed to act for months and when they did, they botched it. It was dereliction of duty at its worst. The approximately 20-month saga involved colossal government failure exacerbated by a complete collapse of government oversight that was so bad readers will think it’s fiction, but we have the evidence that proves it’s not.

On June 18, 2020, Alaska’s Magic Bus (Bus 142), made famous by Christopher Johnson McCandless, was hijacked by the 1st Battalion, 207th Aviation Regiment of the Alaska Army National Guard (AKARNG) which was fully authorized by the Alaska Department of Natural Resources (DNR) in a blatant case of government intrusion and overreach. Shortly before 1:00 PM Atlantic Daylight Time (ADT), using a CH-47 Chinook heavy-lift helicopter, Bus 142 was seized from its nearly six-decade wilderness home on a bench above the Sushana River on the Stampede Trail in the westernmost Wolf Township in Denali Borough in interior Alaska. This eBook convincingly proves that the Alaska Department of Natural Resources (DNR), a very badly conflicted department, erred seriously in authorizing the hijacking of Bus 142 in three primary ways—their justification for the removal of Bus 142 was totally flawed, their decision making process grossly violated Alaskan state law, and their actions amounted to the despicable desecration of a bonafide memorial also in violation of Alaskan state law. While not quite as flagrant, the Alaska Department of Natural Resources (DNR) also chose the University of Alaska Museum of the North (UAMN) as the place where Bus 142 would be restored and ultimately exhibited. Using an outlandish amount of taxpayer money the University of Alaska Museum of the North (UAMN) has embarked on a process and outcome that totally embraces the materialistic world that McCandless so loathed. Had McCandless not been cremated, he'd be spinning in his grave. This eBook also delves deeply into what made Bus 142 famous—Christopher Johnson McCandless—who lived in Bus 142 for several months in 1992 and died in it from starvation. His story has been told by a hard hitting magazine article, the best-selling book Into the Wild and by a blockbuster movie by the same name. Exhaustive research of McCandless’s life for this eBook has produced a lot of interesting new information about the saga and expands greatly on what is already known. In fact, we've dug so deep researching this eBook we think we might have hit bottom once or twice, which with the present-day Internet is a fairly difficult thing to do. One bewildering thing about McCandless is why he simply stayed at Bus 142 and didn’t try to self-exit the Alaskan wilderness and/or summons the saviors. This eBook delves deeper into that puzzling occurrence than any other source has done to date, and sheds some much needed light on the why of it. McCandless is continuously and widely berated for what he did, particularly given all that he had, but this eBook effectively lays to rest all of it with a detailed perspective that will leave readers wondering why such an explanation took decades to be offered. This eBook is an overall aggregator source for the McCandless saga, bringing together for the first time in one publication hundreds of audio and video and print and online sources including a substantial amount of quoted material all of which is accurately and fully cited in its extensive bibliography. Also included is a list of over 150 categorized and clickable links which lead to a wealth of diverse online information about all aspects of this saga. This eBook is also a treasure trove of new ideas and perspectives for student essay writers of all ages that is guaranteed to help them ace their work. In fact, parts of this eBook has been specifically researched and written for secondary and higher educational use which is why the publisher welcomes not-for-profit inquiries and proposals that facilitate student use of this eBook. Finally, while this eBook is extremely black and white factual it also has some very touching material that will leave McCandless fans yearning for more, inspire those who are on the fence about McCandless to side with him, and will likely soften, at least a tad, even the harshest critics of McCandless, of which there are many.