"Reading, Just Drive, Robert Cooperman's poetic saga of driving cab in NYC, seems to me a variation of a Taoist theme I used to explain my years working as a barman, 'If you stay in one place long enough, everything that can happen, will.' The fares Bob describes, his fellow hacks, the crazy dispatcher, will all be familiar to anyone who has worked in the service industry or who regularly enjoys good narrative poetry. Wherever it is you need to go in this 'Divine Comedy' of the human condition, Just Drive, takes you there. Hop in and enjoy the ride. And don't forget the tip." -Alan Catlin,...

DRAFT BOARD BLUES is more than the story of a draft dodger. It's about a war and a generation's response to our debacle in Vietnam. As with all wars, old men declared war and then shoved young men into harm's way. And as always, it was mostly the poor and the most desperate who fought the war. The losses were heavy on our side, but for the Vietnamese, they were staggering, unthinkable. Cooperman's narrator at first passively acquiesces to serving and probably dying in that conflagration. But when he gets a brief glimpse that there are other possibilities, he decides he'd rather die than have...