Browsing all posts in January, 2011.

A Journalist With A Nose For Lies: Vaccines & Random House

I first learned how dogged Mnookin could be when he wrote his Vanity Fair article about The Da Vinci Code’s plagiarism of my books. He managed to see through Random House’s high-priced flackery and hacked through all the legal chicanery to produce his piece. And now, Mnookin has written The Panic Virus has prompted worldwide […]

Stieg Larsson, Outliers, Black Swan Events and Bestsellers

My good friend Billy Ethridge got me to thinking about the following question: Q: What do Stieg Larsson, and John (A Confederacy of Dunces) Kennedy have in common? A: Nobody gave a damn about their books until after they were dead. Obviously, being dead is no guarantee of writing a bestseller. All the forgotten dead […]

500+ “Moderate” Muslim Scholars Support Blasphemer Assassination

If there were any doubt that insanity reigns among the world Islamic community’s leadership, the article, below,  should erase any doubts (along with other things like murder plots over cartoons and death decrees for those who question the inerrancy of every word in the Qur’an.) LAHORE, Pakistan (Associated Press) — More than 500 Muslim scholars […]

Why I Couldn’t Write Perfect Killer Before My Mother Died

Perfect Killer is a substantial departure for me and a book that had to wait for my mother to die before I could write it. My mother, Anabel Bradford Perdue Ellis was one of the last of the “Steel Magnolias,” born on one of her her father’s two cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta (Saints’ […]

The Original Matrix

Long before The Matrix, long before scientists began to believe that the universe is a giant two-dimensional hologram, there was Simulacron-3: a science-fiction, suspense thriller about a computer scientist who has created a simulated world, only to discover that he is a simulation in some higher power’s computer simulation. I read this book when it […]