Nowadays, you almost have to be a celebrity in order to be a successful author. This Website isn’t an attempt to make myself a celebrity, because frankly I’d rather fly under the radar, although maybe it’s an attempt to make myself a character. But mainly the site is here because I’d like to spread my stories around. I believe in the things I write about, and I'd like to introduce you to the characters I encounter. There are good people out there.  So here we are.

The site includes links to a number of projects. First there’s the book “At All Costs,” published by Random House, which I hope will be discovered for the unique  story that it is, if not widely recognized for the ungodly amount of research that went into it. Bookstores think it’s a World War II history book, but it’s actually a character-driven, page-turning, dive-bombing, shoot-‘em-up sea adventure story. It tells how two American merchant mariners kept Hitler from getting the oil in Iraq and Iran, and winning the war. Last time I checked, 21 of 25 reader reviews on Amazon gave it five stars.

Then there’s “Fast Guys, Rich Guys and Idiots,” which the great Brock Yates in the Wall Street Journal book review called one of the five best books ever written about motorsports. It’s a rollicking memoir of two years I spent driving any racecar I could strap myself into, most memorably a NASCAR Oldsmobile with 550 horsepower and no brakes that I crashed a couple of times, and blew two engines in one day in its final race at Daytona. Out-of-print hardcover copies bring as much as $200, but it was reprinted in paperback by the prestigious University of Nebraska Press last year.

There’s the Bandit Blog, the ongoing story of that infamous Oldsmobile that starred in “Fast Guys.” I called it the Old Refrigerator (at first). It was once driven by the great Dale Earnhardt, and soon will be raced again by me. After sitting and rotting for 20 years, it was recently and expensively restored—it has great brakes this time!—and last year it landed in a big black trailer in my yard. I’ve got a steel garage to build this spring. I hope to have it ready for the Rose Cup races in Portland in June. I might get to race against my hero Monte Shelton.

There’s also the Road Test Blog. I’ve been an automotive journalist for 15 years, my specialty being high-performance cars. I slip the best bits from my reviews into the blog. I’ve also recycled parts of some of the magazine articles I’ve written from behind the wheel of spectacular racing cars on legendary circuits around the country and the world.

Finally, there are links (or soon will be) to peeks of two books that I’m working on, a memoir and a novel. I guess you’d call “Senor Madre” a parenting book, but this account of raising my two sons mostly as a single dad is turning into a story that’s every bit as rollicking as crashing and blowing up engines in a 550-horsepower stock car. Meanwhile, the novel “River Without a Cause” will be a dark story of redemption that takes place in the deepest part of the Amazon jungle, on the river that Theodore Roosevelt discovered (and nearly died on) with the Brazilian explorer Candido Rondon.

I’m the only journalist ever to have descended this wicked whitewater river through hundreds of miles of Indian territory and called the River of Doubt, which I did with a furiously bickering environmental expedition about a decade ago. In my novel, the ghost of TR visits bow-and-arrow-shooting, mahogany-smuggling, angry Amazon Indians.

So, welcome to my website. Some of it is still under construction, but I hope the content keeps you here a while.