Manny Hillman's Books

Though a Rose Has Thorns

By: Manny Hillman

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The time period of the novel spans the life of Jewel Carpenter McLain (1900-1995) from the age of fourteen to a few months after her death. As a precocious child living in India, Jewel receives most of her education from an Indian scholar-tutor and from her parents library. Even at this early stage she already has an uncompromising aversion to violence. At nineteen, she leaves India for Cambridge to continue studying languages. She is diverted from her studies by an encounter with very poor children and devotes much of her time helping them and educating them. Malcolm McLain, who had met her in India convinces Jewel to marry him, to move with him to the United States, and to help him use his inherited wealth to help people in need. Jewel continues to help destitute people wherever she finds them for the rest of her life. A second story line concerns an American of Lebanese descent, Yussuf Aqami, an electrical engineer who marries Harriet Adnan, a Turkish-born musician. Shortly after their marriage, Yussuf becomes an international dealer in weapons. This distresses his wife, who, along with her artistic friends, has spent much of her time protesting the United Statess use of military force in international affairs. However, she feels bound to Yussuf both because of Islamic tradition and because she is pregnant. It takes another seventeen years for Harriet to leave Yussuf when he develops an hysterical fear of being assassinated. Yussuf finds refuge from his fear by losing himself in a large crowd of people, part of a growing international cult, who assemble to listen to a mysterious flute. A third story line involves an assortment of scientists: biochemists Dante Peroni and Sybil Sporn, and several others from various fields. Sybil meets Jewel McLain one day in Bombay, where Jewel tries to convince her to pursue particularly challenging research even though it may jeopardize her career by not producing immediate publications. Several years later, when Sybil decides to search for a genetic cause of violence, Jewel agrees to finance a small research institute for this purpose, and Dante joins Sybil in the enterprise. The research group is beset by a dilemma of how to distinguish violent people from the nonviolent. (A distracting example is a man with a lifelong devotion to nonviolence, who spends the final months of his life assassinating weapons merchants as a means of promoting peace in the world.) In the end, using the blood of prison inmates who are differentiated for their violent or nonviolent attributes by their wardens, the research group finds a correlation that suggests that they are on the road to finding the correct gene. A correlation, of course, may be meaningless. Todd Werben, a young black chemist, is very concerned about the possible abuses of their discovery if they should ever succeed. The cult of those who listen to a mysterious flute encompasses a growing portion of the world and touches the lives of almost everyone in the novel.

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Page Count

318

Publisher

Xlibris Corporation

Published Date

ISBN 10

1462833144

ISBN 13

9781462833146

Travel Tales

By: Manny Hillman

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Travel Tales

By: Manny Hillman

Here are eleven stories about the variety of people one might encounter during travel. The author confesses that he has met many of these characters during his own travels. The situations in the stories are sometimes similar to what actually occurred, but mostly they are invented combinations, or merely total inventions. A Danish woman travels across the whole Aegean Sea to search for her lover on an island in the Cyclades. A photographer of flowers finds a unique inn. The beach at the inn is so beautiful and so isolated that the name of the country must be kept secret. The photographer is fascinated by the other five guests at the inn who are all half his age, but mostly by the young and beautiful manager. Two brothers driving across the remote, central part of Iceland meet a travel writer, an adventurer, and hear him tell of one of his most fearful adventures. A young couple vacationing in Egypt hit on a way of translating the hieroglyphs on a wall that no one has ever managed to do before. An elderly man living in Irkutsk, Russia, stops two tourists from the U.S. and asks them to send him a special gift as a favor. He, in turn, will send the woman two rings made of a special stone. A young American soldier from Vermont, on a train in France, traveling home after World War I, meets a young woman on her way home from Rhodesia, about to be married in England. A man is on a fantastic journey but where he was, and what he really did see is a mystery for the reader to solve. A middle aged man and his much younger bride, who loves to tell stories that she probably creates on the spot, are visiting the island of Samos. He is having a hard time keeping up with her vigorous pace, but the reward of his efforts will be more stories for his wife to tell. A journalist wants to interview a wealthy and very generous contessa. His search for her takes him to several unusual places. I, the author, do not know if the journalist will ever write an article about her. A young American woman, a secretary, temporarily gives up her job in order to assay a life as a chef on a small yacht in the Caribbean. An anxious Hungarian couple is on the way home from their first vacation outside of Hungary. The travel restrictions for Hungarians are just beginning to change. Before each story is a one-page vignette telling of the authors experiences at various border crossings. They start with: Some borders are easy to cross, like the time we drove right through one without even noticing until we were some miles past. and end with How should one be greeted on first entering Greece? By bolts of lightning thrown by Zeus himself.

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Page Count

158

Publisher

Xlibris Corporation

Published Date

ISBN 10

1462833136

ISBN 13

9781462833139

Neil's

A Manhattan Cabaret

By: Manny Hillman

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Neil's

A Manhattan Cabaret

By: Manny Hillman

After an absence of almost fifty years, Larry looked for a cabaret that he had worked in as a waiter and found that it had been replaced by a parking lot. In his youth he was an innocent, aspiring writer, just out of college, looking for a place to work where hopefully he could obtain material for short stories. He found Neils, the cabaret, and talked his way into a job as a waiter despite the dangers and his slight appearance. Neils was a clip joint that was frequented mainly by servicemen and prostitutes. Larrys education removing him from navet began quickly. Larry describes his first meeting of prostitutes, an alcoholic man whose intoxication increased without even drinking the rum he had ordered, and encounters with servicemen who were benign and threatening. He also describes the musical entertainment provided by the cabaret that helped entice people to enter the place, women who came to Neils who may or may not have been prostitutes, army stories that some of the soldiers told him, a wedding in the cabaret, nights of fear, fights that he had to avoid, and a musician who had survived the second world war and dreamt some weird dreams. Incidents about Larrys non-cabaret life enter the narration, including his meeting the woman he married. Flo, an artist, would have supported him in his effort to write, but other matters intervened, and Larry had to wait almost fifty years to resurrect his notes and write his tale.

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Page Count

172

Publisher

Xlibris Corporation

Published Date

ISBN 10

1462833152

ISBN 13

9781462833153

Book's by Manny Hillman

Though a Rose Has Thorns

Though a Rose Has Thorns

Travel Tales

Travel Tales

Neil's

Neil's

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