Overview
Though I have periodically worked as an editor -- including for a magazine I co-founded in Paris -- over the past near-forty years I have been lucky enough to mainly follow my many and varied interests as a writer. Most of my books have been non-fiction, but I take particular pride in an historical fiction called Hoopla, which The New York Times' lead critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called "a crackerjack novel, as authentic as a photograph" and the Times Sunday Book Review described "as among the splendid novels about sports." In the realm of mass commercial fiction, my medical thriller The Magic Bullet (Delacorte) was published in twenty or so languages. I have also written a number of screenplays.
Among my non-fiction books are two memoirs with very different focuses. One of the Guys is about coming of age as a young man in the midst of the feminist revolution; How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace) deals, as the name suggests, with my political journey from left to right. Since when I wrote it I had in mind as a target audience those like myself -- lifelong progressives unexpectedly entertaining second thoughts -- I was surprised to find its readers were mainly conservative. Happily, there were a very large number of them.
Along the way, I have from time to time collaborated with others on their books, including Peter Malkin, the Israeli Mossad agent who captured Adolf Eichmann (Eichmann in My Hands), and former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg, on his books on media bias. Re. this last: in recent years, I've done a fair amount of political writing/commentary, though I don’t like to be pigeon-holed. Even in the current atmosphere, most of this has been good humored.
The best kind of work is when it's also fun, and I like to do my part to make sure it is.
Background? I grew up in New Rochelle, New York, the son of a writer of Broadway musicals; attended Pomona College, and then Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.