Theodore Roosevelt Crenshaw, "Best Heart-Throb" of his high school class, now in is early thirties is looking to get what he wants out of life regardless of what anybody thinks. He meets Pamela White, a sharp 38-year-old business woman whose sexual hunger cannot be drowned in bourbon. She makes him an offer he can't refuse. At nearly the same time he runs into Beverly Simons, a slightly neurotic, rather plump high school classmate with whom he once had a one-night stand. She is now widowed with a strikingly beautiful six-year-old daughter. Enter Jerry Weinstein, Esq., a rotund, gourmand...

Roland Flaubert was a gifted teacher who inspired his students. "In poetry is found the true power of the language," he would tell them. "We see this especially in writers like Shakespeare where words are ripped from their moorings and made to soar..." He wanted so much for them to understand that the ideas in Siddhartha, for a different example, were profound and noble. He said, "You could listen to the river, and if you listened with all your heart and soul, you could hear every sound and know the heart of every creature, great and small, and see that they are all the same... "This is an...

Someone said that all fiction is autobiographical however well disguised. Certainly this is psychologically true. Stephen King (I presume) never slashed anyone and perhaps never feared the knife, but he knew somehow to the tips of his toes what such experiences were like. And Shakespeare never ruled a kingdom nor advanced an army but he knew the burden. So maybe the autobiographical life of writers comes from both their personal experience and from their acute imaginings of events never lived. And in such imaginings comes the power and significance of fiction. It is a sharing of the reality...

Dennis Littrell's True Crime Companion lets the reader snuggle up to reviews of some of the more lurid, sensational and frankly unbelievable books written about how the best laid plans of idiots, degenerates, psychopaths and other criminals can go horribly wrong-or right, depending on your point of view. Littrell highlights the JonBenet Ramsey case, and in case you were in doubt, solves it. He recalls the satanic sexual abuse hysteria of the late 1980s and early 1990s and sets the perception of what happened and why straight as a laser beam. The war on drugs? He's got a take on that. Scott...

In addition to 52 of Dennis Littrell's best or most representative poems "Like a tsunami headed for Hilo" contains two appendices, one entitled, "On the teaching of poetry at the high school level" and the other a poetry quiz that tests your ability to distinguish between "good" poetry and "bad" poetry, or as Littrell has it between professional poetry and the not so professional. Littrell was considered one of the top poetry teachers in the Los Angeles area when he taught at Mira Costa High School in the late eighties and early nineties. His mentor was Dr. Marilyn Whirry, who in 2000 went to...

This is an extraordinary book. There is nothing quite like it in the literature. What Dennis Littrell does is review some of the great tomes of evolution, especially recent evolution, written by some of the most glittering luminaries and critique them in a way that few people can. Littrell has the knowledge, but more importantly, he has the freedom to candidly and insightfully evaluate and criticize what evolutionary biologists, evolutionary psychologists and others from similar disciplines have written. The book is divided into six chapters: Human Evolution, Evolution vs. Creationism,...

Here for the first time are all of Dennis Littrell's reviews of plays, novels, and short story collections in one handy volume Included among the seventy-seven reviews (over sixty thousand words; 213 pages) are mini essays on and about some of the greats of literature, including reviews of works by Leon Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Arthur C. Clarke, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alberto Moravia, etc. Additionally Littrell reviews mystery and popular writers such as James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Patricia Highsmith along with reviews of works by virtual unknowns....

Is yoga a religion? Does yoga lead to the acquisition of psychic powers? Is a guru necessary? What is meditation? What is karma? What is pranayama? What is bliss? What exactly is kundalini? Can yoga cure obesity? What about addictions? Can yoga free us from the fear of death? In this revolutionary book on yoga, Dennis Littrell, who has practiced and studied yoga for nearly four decades, answers these and many other questions in a straight-forward, non-mystical manner as he takes the reader beyond hatha yoga, beyond yoga for health, beyond religious mysticism to the real yoga that has come...

"Hard Science and the Unknowable" is another extraordinary book from Dennis Littrell. There is nothing quite like it in the literature. What Littrell does is review in depth 117 popular science and pseudoscience books covering a range of topics from aliens and UFOs to cosmology and particle physics. The result is a collection of essays that informs and gives meaning and relevance to our lives against the grandeur of the cosmos. The book is divided into eight chapters beginning with "Aliens, SETI and UFOs" through "Futurists" and ending with "Metaphysical Science." Tomes by some of the august...