Just the Facts

I'm the author of books that include Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Basic Books/Perseus, November 2007), Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons (Basic Books/Perseus, 2005), The Kennedys at War (Doubleday, 2002), The Secret Six (Crown, 1995) and John Burroughs: An American Naturalist (Black Dome Press, 1992). Several chapters of The Kennedys at War have been purchased for film adaptation by Robert Greenwald Productions.

While biography remains my first love, I've as well been quite active in other realms including green-politics and folk music.

My prose has appeared in numerous national publications.

Terrain: I live with my family in southern coastal Rhode Island. We've been here for 14 years (having moved from metro New York) and the experiment seems to be working out.

Music: During my dissident youth I recorded with Pete Seeger for Moe Asch's Folkways Records, now Smithsonian Folkways. I was literally a kid when I studied guitar with the great Gary Davis. (If you want my opinion, Jorma Kaukonen reigns as the best contemporary interpreter of Gary's tunes.) Way back in 1980, I edited The Clearwater Songbook, with an introduction by Seeger, which G. Schirmer published as a fundraiser for the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. (A previous effort had been Don McLean's Songs & Sketches of the First Clearwater Crew published by North River Press in 1970.)

March of 2008 saw me playing my first public gig in quite a while, performing with Happy and Artie Traum in Albany. (See photograph below.) I had fun, and will probably have to do more of this fairly soon. Stay tuned.

I am a member of PEN American Center.

I was diagnosed as "type 2" bipolar (aka, manic depressive) in 2007. This is a progressive biochemical disorder from which I've evidently suffered for a very long time, perhaps even since adolescence, and which had reached a grave critical mass in recent years. I am currently under treatment, on meds that my doctor and I are fine-tuning, and I am slowly learning how to cope more efficiently and constructively than I have in the past. (In the meantime, I continue to pick up the shattered pieces from one of my last great, extended hypo-manias.) I only mention the bipolar issue because I approve of the movement of sufferers who are "outing" themselves, discussing the disorder, and thus working to remove the stigma that surrounds it.

A number of my books are available in audio editions from Recorded Books.

I've got a MySpace page.

You can also find me on Facebook.

The page you are looking at was a blog up until April 2, 2008, but going forward it will simply be my little shingle hanging in the winds of cyberspace.



Below: Performing at WAMC-Albany's Linda Norris Auditorium in March 2008 with Happy (left) and Artie Traum (center). Photo by Jane Traum. Left-click to enlarge.