Pegasus Book Club

This is a heartwarming story about the ups and downs in the life of Rick Dockery—a third-string quarterback for the Cleveland Browns.

In a deciding game, Rick manages to successfully orchestrate the downfall of his team from a 17-point lead. In that process Browns loses the game, Rick gets mashed up, ends up in the hospital, and becomes a national laughing stock and villain. He is dropped from the team.

Rick’s chances of joining another team in the US become zero as nobody wants him, but his agent finally finds a team that would accept him—Panthers of Parma of Italy. Italians play American football and each team can have one or two American players. Only the Americans are paid; the Italians play because they are passionate about the game. Most players have full-time jobs. The Panthers have a judge, an airline pilot, an engineer, several truck-drivers, two restaurant owners, a dentists, two stonemasons, a couple of auto mechanics, and so on.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since its first publication in 1976, On Writing Well by William Zinsser has become a classic guide on writing nonfiction. It has sold millions of copies and still is the number one book on writing nonfiction.

According to New York Times, “On Writing Well is a bible for a generation of writers looking for clues to clean, compelling prose.”

The book has four parts in addition to an introduction, a bibliography and an index. The first part—Principles—contains seven chapters and deals with important aspects of writing like how to write clear, simple, and concise prose, the need and importance of reviewing, editing, and rewriting, how to avoid clutter, the importance of mastering the fundamentals, how to identify your audience and write for them, how to find the right words and where to find them, and so on. This section contains one of the most useful advices of this book:

The point is that you have to strip your writing down before you can build it back up. You must know what the essential tools are and what job they were designed to do. Extending the metaphor of carpentry, it’s first necessary to be able to saw wood neatly and to drive nails. Later you can bevel the edges or add elegant finials, if that’s your taste. But you can never forget that you are practicing a craft that’s based on certain principles. If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.

I’ll admit that certain nonfiction writers, like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, have built some remarkable houses. But these are writers who spent years learning their craft, and when at last they raised their fanciful turrets and hanging gardens, to the surprise of all of us who never dreamed of such ornamentation, they knew what they were doing. Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.

Read the rest of this entry »

The peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians are entering the final phases. A series of seemingly random murders escalates the tension between the two sides and threatens to derail the peace process.

Washington recalls the ace negotiator and mediator Maggie Costello to set things right. But Maggie is troubled by her past—her mistake that caused her previous assignment to fall apart. He is also discouraged by her husband. But Maggie decides to return from her exile and becomes a part of the peace talks.

When she starts work, she finds that the solution to the peace process lies in the contents of a 4000 year old clay tablet that is looted from the Bagdad Museum of Antiquities. She also discovers that the killings are not random but related and all are tied to the tablet.

Soon Maggie with the help of Uri Guttuman—son of the murdered archaeologist Shimon Guttman—sets out to find the clay tablet, with their adversaries watching their every move, killing everybody they plan to meet.

Read the rest of this entry »