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You can order Radhaa’s healing workbook:

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The post Quan Yin -The Goddess Code by Radhaa Nilia-What you are reading! first appeared on River View Observer.

by  Diane Lombardi-Fleming

Hudson County native and the author of his bestselling memoir, The Boss Always Sits In The Back, Jon Dâ€Amore has published his long awaited sequel. Except that itâ€s not really a sequel. Deadfellas incorporates the best (and the worst) of the North Jersey mob with a supernatural theme, which makes for a satirical tale where everyone involved gets their just reward. Where “The Boss” was based on Dâ€Amoreâ€s true life events, Deadfellas stays with the Jersey mob theme, but the story is fiction. “No one would have guessed that mixing the underworld with the real underworld would result in such an entertaining combination,” Dâ€Amore says, after receiving reviews from literary insiders and other authors fortunate enough to get advance copies.

            The author expertly used his ability for storytelling, humor, creativity and deep character development to tell a tale that has the reader rooting for the bad guys. Dâ€Amore has taken these unlikely elements and once again created a “hard to put down” book. The main characters are complex, honorable, sinister, loyal, and in spite of their occupation, likeable. Yet, by the final chapters, one finds theyâ€re hoping everyone gets out alive.

            The fact that Dâ€Amore knows and understands the mob is evident from the first pages of Deadfellas. That he has a sense of humor is also evident. That he is a master at weaving very different elements into a cohesive and fun book is a joy for the reader, and speaks highly of the authorâ€s creativity and imagination.

            Historically, itâ€s the book that gets released and is eventually, and hopefully, turned into a screenplay. But when Jon Dâ€Amore is involved, things never happen in the traditional manner.

            Several years ago while living and working in Hollywood as a script doctor, Dâ€Amore partnered with screenwriter Steve Barr to create an idea for a feature film to fit the zombie-genre. Jon and Steve now laugh as they remember producers telling them they had missed the boat, and that the “zombie wave is over.” As detailed by Barr in Deadfellas†Foreword, this was soon followed by the release of films like Zombieland, and a stream of TV shows such as The Walking Dead, iZombie and many others, “Once again,” states Dâ€Amore, “Those who claim to know what theyâ€re talking about, often donâ€t.”

            Dâ€Amore will be touring the country, beginning in Los Angeles in early September and will arrive for several appearances in New Jersey and New York City during late-September into early-October.

            To purchase signed copies of Deadfellas and The Boss Always Sits In The Back, go to www.Deadfellas.com. Unsigned copies and e-books are also available through Amazon, BarnesAndNoble.com and iTunes.

The post Jon D’Amore Delivers His Next Book, Deadfellas first appeared on River View Observer.

 By Sally Deering

Like many young writers in their 20s searching for the road less traveled, Vincent Czyz packed up his car one day and hit the highway for a cross-country trip. Jack Kerouac did it as a member of the Beat Generation; Hippies in the 60s did it to find girls with flowers in their hair. To a budding writer, The West can be as inviting as a ballpoint pen and a clean sheet of paper.

Czyzâ€s travels to find adventure led him to a town in Kansas and a colorful cast of characters who were hard-drinking, had their hearts broken more than once, and could tell a story as good as Louis C.K. Guys with names like Zirque, the Blue Jean Queen, and Stevie “The Duke of” Pallucca.

These characters – and others – are the heart and soul of “Adrift in a Vanishing City,” (Rain Mountain Press, 239 pgs; paperback; $18;) a collection of short stories Czyz wrote with a sensitivity for soft-hearted, lonesome everymen – and women – roaming restlessly through life like stray dogs searching for a home.

Czyz says his style of short story writing breaks away from the convention where things get tied up in a neat little bow at the end. Instead his characters slip in and out of the stories like ghosts haunting each otherâ€s dreams.

“What I tried to do was fuse poetry and short story,” Czyz says, taking a mid-afternoon break at a Jersey City coffee shop. “I wanted something more intense. I didnâ€t want disposable sentences.”

Hereâ€s an excerpt from the character “Pap” who stands 5â€1”, with a clubfoot. Heâ€s the town drunk in love with the prettiest girl in town, similar to the main character in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” Czyz says.

“…Lookin out the window, the light growin, he spotted a pale moon, cold round rock up there, white and frostbitten, a high school-age god hurled himself an iceball through space. A new meaning to cold if he could be up there to feel it, him and his pot-belly stove, everything on the whole miniature planet (misshapen like him, only done half way, sâ€posed to be a planet but look what happened, got shortchanged in a big way, only gets away with bein so ugly ‘cause it gives off a shine), him and his pot-belly stoveâ€d be all the warmth in that corner a the universe, any other life up thereâ€d come shuffling over to the beacon light. Pap Prometheus and his Amazin Woodburnin Stove…”

 “One character, Earl Kukovich, heâ€s a colorful character of Polish extraction, and one of the funniest people youâ€d ever meet,” Czyz says. “Iâ€m skipping over the fact that he killed five people.”

Then thereâ€s Stevie, “The Duke of” Pallucca, who was educated at Notre Dame and worked as a bookie. Czyz says: “I would go fishing with him, partying, horseback riding and go with him on his bookie runs. This is the late 1980s-90s. Stevie was intense. He could recite T.S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg. He wrote poetry, too.”

Czyz roots poetic language with character, he says, and his writing has won several awards including the 1994 W. Faulkner -W. Wisdom Prize for Short Fiction. A 2011 Truman Capote Fellow at Rutgers-Newark, Czyz teaches freshman composition at Saint Peterâ€s University in Jersey City, and creative writing at The College of New Jersey in Ewing. His students need only read his bookâ€s first chapter, “Zee Gee and the Blue Jean Baby Queen” to see that their teacher elegantly fuses prose with imagery, describing timeless moments as if remembering a dream.

“Every writer expresses something intense,” Czyz says. “You ask yourself, ‘what words do I use that will make people feel what I felt? Like a sunset. How do I capture that in words?â€â€

Many of Czyzâ€s characters are mysterious, and poets at heart yearning for something just beyond reach. Czyz, who cut his journalism teeth writing features for the North Jersey Herald News in Passaic, writes his characters with empathy and a deep feeling for humanity.

On his travels to and from Kansas, Czyz says he had no intention of writing a book about the friends he had made. He kept a journal, sure, but he was just one of the boys, not a writer peeking into their lives from the outside.

“Iâ€m so sorry I didnâ€t have a tape recorder,” Czyz says. “They were so funny. There are a lot of good storytellers in The West where conversation is still more of an art.”

Czyz earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Rutgers-New Brunswick; a Master of Fine Arts degree from Rutgers-Newark, and a Masterâ€s degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. His short stories have been published in periodicals like Camera Obscura, Georgetown Review, Skidrow Penthouse, The Massachusetts Review and Quiddity. He lived in Istanbul, Turkey, for 10 years where his fiction has been anthologized in Turkish, and Czyz now resides in Jersey City with his wife, Neslihan.

In October, Czyz has a new book coming out, “The Christos Mosaic,” a thriller written for the commercial fiction market, he says, whereas “Adrift in a Vanishing City” was more a labor of love. At the end of the book, he recalls a pair of sneakers Steve “The Duke of” Pallucca gave him in 2006. When he learned Pallucca had passed away, Czyz and Neslihan took a road trip to visit Palluccaâ€s grave.

Czyz writes: “They were well past their expiration date, but I couldnâ€t bring myself to throw them out, so we rode half way across the country and put the sneakers on Stevieâ€s grave with a note – laminated with packing tape and tied to a lace – explaining their significance.”

Where to buy “Adrift in a Vanishing City”

 “Adrift in a Vanishing City” can be purchased online at Amazon.com; and at Barnes & Noble bookstores; Three Lives Bookstore and Co. in Manhattan; and at Word bookstore on Newark Ave, Jersey City.

 

Visit Vincent Czyzâ€s page on Facebook.

The post ADRIFT IN A VANISHING CITY NEW BOOK BY VINCENT CZYZ first appeared on River View Observer.

Frank “Boss” Hague at Center of Controversy, Again!

 By Sally Deering

Some reporters seem to have ink in their veins; just the hint of a good tale propels them to find the facts, pinpoint the characters and put it in print.

That seems to be the case with Ron Semple, a 5^th Generation Jersey Cityite who walked the Jersey City beat for the Hudson Dispatch and Jersey Journal in the 1950s and 60s, Semple wrote news and features and at 27 became the Jersey Journalâ€s City Editor with a crew of 50 reporters he could send out on a momentâ€s notice to get a story. More than 50 years later, Semple finds himself once again writing copy about his hometown.

In BLACK TOM, Terror on the Hudson (Top-Hat Books, 516 pgs.; $27.95) Semple turns back the calendar to 1916 when German saboteurs destroyed a large railroad munitions depot (Black Tom) on the Jersey City waterfront. The explosion killed and injured several night watchmen and caused extensive property damage costing millions of dollars.

“What was perplexing about “Black Tom” was that everyone maintained it was an ‘accident†until the railroad sued Germany in 1924 for damages and years later collected $50 million dollars,” Semple says. “How could that have happened in a big city that was just a grouping of ethnic villages where no secrets were possible?”

Thatâ€s just a tip of the proverbial iceberg.

When the Black Tom explosion occurred, Semple wasnâ€t even around. Born in 1935, Sempleâ€s dad left Semple and his mother when he was a year-old; his mother went to work in a dime store in Hoboken and Sempleâ€s grandparents took care of him. Sempleâ€s dad had been a reporter at the Jersey Journal and he would come back to visit his son and take him along to the paperâ€s newsroom in Journal Square.

“I would sit there banging away at a typewriter with two fingers,” Semple says

Although his dad introduced him to a city newsroom, Semple says the real influence on his decision to be a journalist came from Fr. Raymond York at St. Peterâ€s Preparatory School in Jersey City. Semple was trying out for the football team because “thatâ€s how you got dates with girls” and he was lousy at punting the pigskin so Fr. York recruited him to write for the school newspaper. Semple penned a humor column and other stories for the high school reader and after graduation set off to Loyola University in New Orleans to study journalism.

He left Loyola to serve in the U.S. Marines – at the tail end of the Korean War – and after his discharge he returned to Jersey City, attended Saint Peterâ€s College and took a job as a reporter for the Hudson Dispatch, a morning newspaper headquartered in Union City and distributed throughout Hudson. He left there to be a reporter for the Jersey Journal where, at 27, he was promoted to City Editor.

“Thatâ€s the job I really loved,” Semple says. “I had all these reporters and I could cover everything I wanted. I had a list of assignments and it would run five pages long. I enjoyed the control; you could tailor what the newspaper was going to be like. In those days, as City Editor you not only did that, you put out the front page. I learned how to read type upside down and backwards.”

Sempleâ€s career path takes more twists and turns than the streets of Jersey City. He sailed to West Africa as a crewman on a freighter, traveled extensively in Scotland, Ireland and Sweden, worked as a truck driver, construction laborer, and the mate on a charter fishing boat. Semple also worked as legislative secretary to a state senator and sold nuts and bolts in a hardware store.

These days, Semple lives in Advance, North Carolina with his wife Jane. He was with FEMA for ten years working on hurricane rescues from Katrina to Superstorm Sandy. It was on a visit back to Jersey City to see former colleagues that Semple felt inspired to write about the Black Tom incident.

“I came up to Jersey City to visit friends, Bob Gallagher and Bob Waldron (former Jersey Journal reporters) and we went down to Liberty State Park where we could see the gap in the Skyline where the Twin Towers had been,” Semple says. “I saw a historical plaque on the Black Tom Explosion of 1916. Iâ€m a 5^th generation Jersey Cityite and City Editor for many years, and I never heard of Black Tom. I started reading about it and finally in 2013, I went to Warren Murphyâ€s 80^th birthday party, and he said why donâ€t you stop talking about that damn book and write it.”

Murphy, a highly-successful author and screenwriter wrote this on Sempleâ€s BLACK TOM book jacket: “… Mr. Semple has managed to combine fact and fiction along with a family saga of a time in our history when it really was all different, so the book is history and epic and exciting and sometimes laugh-aloud funny, as it tells the down-home stories of the overlapping ethnic groups who peopled those cities that long century ago…”

Being a book author is another exciting chapter in Sempleâ€s life, he says, and heâ€s already working on his next book.

“I quit newspapers at 52 and spent the next 30 years in emergency services,” Semple says. Iâ€ve had a great life.”

BLACK TOM, Terror on the Hudson, can be purchased at Barnes & Noble; and online at amazon.com, and Books-a-million.com.

On Wed, Nov. 5^th, at 7:30 pm

Ron Semple will be appearing at

WORD book store

123 Newark Ave, JC

(201) 763-6611

www.wordbookstores.com

The post FIRE & VICE IN Old JERSEY CITY first appeared on River View Observer.

Broadwayâ€s Unsung Artisans

 By Sally Deering

 When some folks see Broadwayâ€s Theater District for the first time they ooh, ah and buy tickets to the show theyâ€re dying to see. When Timothy White, Ph.D., an assistant professor of history at New Jersey City University first saw Broadway, he not only bought tickets, he began researching its glorious history.

Dr. Whiteâ€s curiosity centered on the artists behind the scenes, the nameless crafts men-and-women who sewed the costumes, built the scenery and provided the lights needed to spotlight all those chorus girls in musical showstoppers. Whiteâ€s curiosity led him to the Library of Performing Arts to write his dissertation for his Columbia University Ph.D. and the result is his first published book BLUE COLLAR BROADWAY: The Craft and Industry of American Theater (pub: University of Pennsylvania Press) now on the shelves of Barnes & Noble and online at Amazon.com.

 In chapters like “Second Hand Rose”: The Stage Before the Broadway Brand; and “A Factory for Making Plays” Broadwayâ€s Industrial District, White takes readers on a guided tour of what it was like when the shops and businesses in the theater district were all a part of the Great White Way, where theater artisans built the scenery, costumes, lights, and everything else that went into putting on a Broadway show for over a 100 years. Whiteâ€s book shines a spotlight on the history of those theater people barely remember in Broadwayâ€s theatrical history books.

Professor White took a few minutes of his busy schedule – he just had a performance/reading at Art House Productions in Jersey City with students of NJCUâ€s theater department singing shows from Broadway shows – and shared his passion for Broadway and its history.

RVO:  As a history professor, why did you decide to write a book about Broadway?

TW: I was trained as an historian, but I always loved theater especially when I moved from California to New York. It was 1999 and I dove head first into Broadway. I went to as many shows as I could. First off, I had to make up for long time so I went to see Cats and Phantom of the Opera and caught up on the old stuff like Thoroughly Modern Millie, a lot of great shows. Iâ€ve got the brain of an historian and my heart is in Broadway. When Iâ€m done teaching my classes, Iâ€ll drive off and do Community Theater for fun.

RVO: Why a book about the behind-the-scenes world of Broadway and not the stars?

TW: I became fascinated with the theater district and Times Square and I started doing research, I was studying business listings and Yellow Pages (phone directories) and I found backstage businesses were all over the Theater District. All through the 1940s, 50s and 60s, there were dozens of shops and stores in the Theater District – blue collar stuff. When I came to New York, they were no longer there. There are still people doing great craft work in Midtown, but nowhere near as many.

RVO: Where did you do most of your research?

TW: The Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library has the most important archive; the Billy Rose Theater collection is rich. On Broadway, thereâ€s a tremendous focus on design. The art of costuming depends on the sketch and design and itâ€s an art form. What I was interested in was who built it? Who stitched it together?  For my research, I spoke with the award-winning Broadway costumer designer William Ivey Long. He gave me a great perspective on the industry. I tried to balance my interviews with archival materials.

 RVO: Can you share an anecdote from your book?

TW: One of the stories in the book comes from Hal Prince, the incredible director and producer who has had an incredible Broadway career. It goes back to the original production of West Side Story, and in one of the pieces he wrote, he was explaining that in the original costume design, Irene Sharaff created pants the Sharks and Jets could dance in; the material was distressed, dyed and constructed to look like Leviâ€s. Prince was looking at his budget, and thought couldnâ€t he they just buy a pile of Leviâ€s blue jeans down the street? She said, no, absolutely not. The actors couldnâ€t do that kind of strenuous dancing in Leviâ€s blue jeans, it couldnâ€t be done. They could never kick as high as they needed to. That illustrates the importance of costume construction on Broadway Itâ€s also an example that you have to listen to your craftspeople. It makes the art of Broadway possible.

RVO: How about another anecdote?

TW: Another story connects to anyone who was in New York around the 1970s and knows it was such a different Times Square back then. I was tracking fabric suppliers, doing digital searches, and I got a hit on an address on W.45^th Street, a police report on a murder by a man who was on the run. A stage fabrics company had closed and in its wake, the empty space was being used as a hangout for criminals. This criminal they were looking for had dismembered a man and put the body parts in Theater District garbage cans. The closure of all these Broadway craft shops left the Theater District vulnerable to this type of activity. The musicals were still opening, but being built outside of Times Square. The decline in Broadway craft in Times Square left a lot of the buildings unrented and run down.

RVO: Your book is at Barnes & Nobles, Drama Book Shop and a new indie book store Little City Books in Hoboken. What was it like seeing your book on the shelf for the first time?

TW: It was a thrill.

RVO: Is there another book in the works?

TW: Yes. Iâ€m looking at the finances of Broadway; the behind-the-scenes of Broadway investments. Iâ€m going to try to argue that a Broadway flop helps to move the art of Broadway forward. You need flops in order to have a hit.

You can purchase Dr. Timothy Whiteâ€s book “Blue Collar Broadway” at:

amazon.com; Barnes & Noble; Little City Books in Hoboken; and the Drama Book Store in NYC.

 Excerpt from Blue Collar Broadway:

The Craft and Industry of the American Theater

 By Dr. Timothy R. White

 “…Had anyone developed a special curiosity about the people who hammered, painted, and sewed behind the scenes in the commercial theater, they would have been easy to find. Especially prior to the 1970s, such skilled workers were overwhelmingly clustered in one district: Times Square. Despite their ubiquity for many decades, previous histories of this quintessential urban space give short shrift to the carpenters, seamstresses, and other craft experts who brought stage shows to fruition They often operated major supply shops and theater-related contract businesses but have yet to Factor significantly into any history of Times Square.

From a single vantage point, Broadway between 48^th and 49^th Streets, one can easily trace the prominence of such shops throughout the twentieth century. In August 1936, for example, the visitor to this stretch of Broadway would have quickly encountered theater-related buildings, businesses, and workers. At midday he or she might have seen actors from the Federal Theatre Projectâ€s We Live and Laugh on their way to rehearsal at Ringle Studios, 1607 Broadway. Directly across the avenue, he or she may have spotted the proprietor Morris Orange or one of his seamstresses on lunch break from their costume rental store at 1600 Broadway. Immediately to the north, the visitor may have seen the cast and craftspeople of the play Stork Mad as they walked to the Ambassador Theatre next door.”

The post BLUE COLLAR BROADWAY: The Craft and Industry of American Theater first appeared on River View Observer.

Written from the heart and experiences of Patty Blanchard, ‘Patty’s Turn: It took faith, courage and the love of her children to save her from attempted murder†sees the author piece together her memories following almost six-decades of abuse at the hands of parents, siblings and lovers. Blanchardâ€s survival is nothing short of a miracle and, by sharing her story, she hopes to empower millions of abused women to take a stance against their malefactors and embark on their own journey to a better life.

Bayonne, NJ — (ReleaseWire) — 11/1/2014 — Memoirs about abuse are certainly not rare, but hardly any span a lifetime and come from the family members of those in the public eye. Tammy Blanchard may be known to audiences and critics around the world, but her mother Patty has kept quiet about her own life, until now.

‘Patty’s Turn: It took faith, courage and the love of her children to save her from attempted murder†fuses a tragic life story with an inspirational message of hope.Synopsis:

This is the memoir of Patty Blanchard, one of 14 children raised in a tough Jersey City family during the 1950s. Patty survived many things during her childhood, but it was the attempted murder she experienced as a mother-of-three that helped her discover what courage, faith and the love of family is really all about.

“I start right at the beginning, aged four years old and at the hands of a physically-abusive mother who had six kids packed into a cramped Jersey City flat without enough beds, clothes and often just stale pieces of bread for dinner,” explains Blanchard. “My baby sister died of Croup and I became the punching bag for my motherâ€s grief, who physically and mentally abused me for the next decade and a half. We also lost a brother, Arthur, who was murdered at fourteen. I left home and married an older man when I was just seventeen. This was my ticket to a new life, or so I thought.”

Continuing, “He and my next husband abused me. At the age of thirty-two I packed up my belongings, my kids and we set off on my promise of a better life. Things were looking up as I built a successful cleaning business from the ground up and was both confident and independent for the first time in my life. I was determined to stay away from abusers. But at the age of thirty-five I found myself fighting for my life, with multiple hammer wounds and being left for dead. Somehow, through the grace of faith and love of my children, I survived.”

Patty didnâ€t write her book for commercial gain. In fact, it started as personal therapy.

“My therapist asked me to write down my thoughts and memories as they came back to me. I did this for years but didnâ€t ever read my notes back. Over twelve years I accumulated more than four-hundred pages and the power of my words caused me to break down when finally reading them. I decided to compile them into a book to help others facing the demons of abuse. If I can help just one person avoid a life like mine, then Iâ€ll see it as a huge success.”

Since its release, the book has garnered a string of rave reviews. Charlotte McNamara comments, “I absolutely loved this book! The writer was very brave, honest and real. Some like to portray” our lives to be perfect. Some of us like to read what really happens in someone’s life, whether good or not so good. This writer however captured my soul. Reading of her childhood and through her life was a heartfelt and left me in tears. Tears for that little girl, tears for that struggling teen …tears for all the other women who can’t tell their story, but sometimes can identify with some things in her book.”

River View Observer adds, “An excellent read -a real page turner about an American family and a young woman’s abusive life and triumphant return from an attempted murder on her life by a former spouse. Ms. Blanchard has created a road map for women looking to move past abusive relationships to a place of empowerment.”

‘Patty’s Turn: It took faith, courage and the love of her children to save her from attempted murder†is available now: http://amzn.to/1usDPU9.

About Patty Blanchard
Patty will celebrate her 60th birthday on Nov.3th with her 3 children, William, Tammy, Thomas and her 4 grandchildren, Ava, William, Kaylee and Jaidah. Patty can finally say she knows what true love is, she met her soul mate Joe and has been skipping down the road of happiness for the past 8 years.

www.facebook.com/pattysturnbypatriciablanchard 

The post Patty’s Turn: New Book, by Mother of Actress Tammy Blanchard, Exposes Lifetime of Harrowing Abuse & Empowers Bold Transition from Victim to Victor first appeared on River View Observer.

“I have heard enough fiction from Mr. Manzo, I donâ€t need to read his book too.”

If itâ€s possible for Governor Chris Christie to offer a book review, then he did so at a recent press conference in Camden when asked about “Ruthless Ambition: The Rise and Fall of Chris Christie,” the new book by former New Jersey State Assemblyman Louis Manzo, which can be seen as a nonfiction work that tells a story that’s stranger than fiction.

Part political expose and part memoir that is illuminating and even laugh-out loud funny, the book, released in April by Trine Day Publishing, examines Manzo’s arrest in July 2009 as part of a federal investigation known as Bid Rig III that swept up political official and religious leaders on charges ranging from accepting bribes to trafficking body parts.  Manzo would eventually be acquitted of the changes against him.

Manzo in the book uses information from various articles and books to look at how Bid Rig III originated in the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office under its former boss (now current NJ Governor) Chris Christie, how it may have paved the way for Christie to assume the Garden State’s highest office in 2009, and helped him ascend in Republican Party politics to be considered as a potential candidate in the 2016 presidential race.

The book is well-sourced, especially with content from internal FBI reports about Manzo’s case that paints a dark, disturbing picture of how one agencyâ€s supposed upholding of the law seemed to deform into wholesale law-breaking to benefit an agenda. In the book, Manzo applies his knowledge of state politics to dissect Christieâ€s time as governor up to the current Bridgegate scandal.

With the fifth anniversary of the July 2009 arrests fast approaching, Manzo, a Jersey City native, spoke to the River View Observer about the origins of the book, Chris Christie as governor, and how Manzoâ€s arrest changed his life.

River View Observer: Has Chris Christie or the U.S. Attorney’s Office of NJ given you feedback about what they thought about the book?

Manzo: “No, no, I don’t anticipate it because I don’t think they want to publicize the book.” (See Christie quote at the beginning of story, New Jersey U.S. Attorney Officeâ€s comments at the end of the story)

RVO: What have been the reactions to the book from people whom you have met during your recent informal book tour who got to read Ruthless Ambition?

Manzo: “Very positive, people like the book, the current events, a lot of the inside stuff about my case. Lawyers love it especially with the exclusive documents and the technical information about the prosecutions. People in state government like the discussion about the pitfalls of Christieâ€s budgets over the years.”

RVO: How long ago did you start writing the book, and did you start out writing about Chris Christie or about your case?

Manzo: “I started writing in January 2010, after I started keeping a journal that I intended to become a manuscript about the case. A literary agent brought the manuscript to a publisher who liked it but felt it was too much about me and a national audience didnâ€t know me. Then I decided to add on material about Christie and incorporate that information into the story about my case.”

RVO: What was it like writing this book?

Manzo: “It was something that kept my mind off my problems as I always working every day. The research is an enormous undertaking; once you researched something, you have to find out and verify it. When I started researching, I found there a pattern to Christieâ€s prosecutions, which looked like they were put together by a Republican strategist.”

RVO: What do you think has been the impact of the July 23, 2009 arrests in terms of politics in this state and locally?

Manzo: “It has had an immense impact; it definitely put Christie in the governorship. Pundits cite that the Bid Rig arrests helped him get into office and make him what he is now. And it has an impact that’s makes this book especially important because when he goes to California or New Hampshire, Christie is not telling people how he got to the point where he is at now.”

RVO: Do you look back and think what would have happened if you had never crossed paths with Solomon Dwek (the federal governmentâ€s informant in the Bid Rig III case who eventually went to jail on unrelated charges)?

Manzo: “You ponder it every day. I would probably still have a business, I would probably still be doing something in Jersey City.”

Note: A spokesperson for the New Jersey U.S. Attorneyâ€s Office said U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman did not read the book, and commented on Manzoâ€s case, “Manzoâ€s prosecution, for conduct the court called “deeply objectionable,” was appropriate given the Hobbs Act case law at the time.”

 For more info, go to www.ruthlessambitionthebook.com

The post Local Author Takes on New Jersey Governor’s Political Career “Ruthless Ambition: The Rise and Fall of Chris Christie” in Stores Now first appeared on River View Observer.

A River View Observer best pick” Ebook”

about –A girl’s life in a Brooklyn Orphanage and the journey she takes  to find her way home.

To read this book go to www.amazon.com/dp/BOO4QOAY7K

 or http://www.bn.com and download your copy for $2.99

The post Award Wining Writer Sally Deering’s First Novella, “The Apple that fell from the Orange Tree” Now Available on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com first appeared on River View Observer.