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I am delighted to announce that my latest book, The Art of Conflict: Tales from the Courtroom, has now been published. Co-authored with Alan C. Kohn, the godfather of St. Louis litigators and the veteran of more than 100 trials, our book provides a unique set of perspectives on the trials and tribulations of the courtroom lawyer. As the Honorable Michael Wolf, retired Chief Justice of the Missouri Supreme Court and Dean of the St. Louis University Law School, writes in his review of the book: Alan Kohn’s exemplary life as a lawyer shines through every other chapter of this fine book, with helpful insights on how law is and should be practiced, and a marvelous memoir of his days as a law clerk in the late 1950s at the United States Supreme Court, the highest honor a young lawyer can get. whose fictional lawyer Rachel Gold makes guest appearances in some of her best roles and, as a prelude to Alan’s essay on judicial activism, a chapter on the fictional Judge Howard Flinch, the worst judge in the history of Missouri (remember it’s fiction) and title character of The Flinch Factor, one of Kahn’s 12 excellent mystery novels. Fellow lawyer Mitch Margo, author of the brilliant historical legal thriller Black Hearts White Minds, wrote the following: The Art of Conflict is a lively dance of legal dramas told in alternating fictional and non-fiction vignettes between lawyer/novelist Michael Kahn and trial attorney Alan Kohn.

Last summer I wrote a post about a cool web page that had created road maps for your favorite road-trip novels, from Jack Kerouac’s cross-country trip in On the Road to The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of the journey he took with his wife Zelda from Connecticut to Alabama in a old automobile he called the “Rolling Junk

My last post opened with a discussion of the evolution of romance novel covers from the chaste era of the 1950s to the soft-core porn covers of later decades. But as I moved on to the more general topic of the history of all book covers, I became so focused on their role–from the original 1884 cover of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to more contemporary examples such as Jurassic Park–that I left no space for a salute to Mark Longmire

I read a fascinating post on the Jezebel website by Kelly Faircloth in which she recounted the history–or, per the title of her post, the “steaming, throbbing history”–of the covers of romance novels, from the sweet innocent covers of the 1950s to the soft-porn bodice-rippers of later decades, many of which featured the male model Fabio, such as the cover shown on the right for Johanna Lindsay’s Gentle Rogue. Some of those later covers edged even closer to hard-core porn, including the one at the top of this post for Tender is the Storm, which, as Ms