James Kaplan

Will and Joel are two forty-three-year-olds in a New Jersey suburb on the verge of the millennium. Will is a married, middle-class soul in torment; Joel is a mad closet genius who sees the world as nobody else does. Will pities Joel; Joel pities Will. Then their twenty-fifth high school reunion changes everything. Two Guys from Verona is a mystery, but not in the conventional sense. Against the backdrop of an unraveling marriage, of romance old and new, and of a community losing its center, Will and Joel plumb the enigmas of sex, love, friendship, and time itself. As the world moves into the inconceivable realm of the 2000s, each man's life takes a turn into a world he never could have imagined.

Philip Pearl, a Jewish poet from Manhattan comes to Pickett State University in Mississippi to teach. But he is the one who gets the education.

As late twentieth century news coverage began to raise serious questions about aircraft safety and airport security, James Kaplan offered his 1996 behind-the-scenes account of John F. Kennedy International Airport transporting the reader "inside" the sprawling J.F.K. to expose the lifeblood of a major metropolitan airport. He presented a panoramic, intimately detailed and highly personal view of the world of flying, and of a fabled airport's inner life, which even seasoned travelers never got to see. While writing The Airport, Kaplan spoke to a variety of key players among the 44,000 employees hired to work around-the-clock at JFK, including administrators, technicians, crime investigators, pilots and skycaps. He interviewed people who held bizarre posts, such as Kennedys notorious "Birdman" who patroled the runways for "laughing seagulls"; the leader of the "Beagle Brigade" who used beagles to track the illegal entry of unwanted materials; and one of the airport's medical team who had to contend with airport "mules," men and women who smuggled drugs by ingesting large quantities of drug packets into their bodies. Kapplan also assessed the crucial role deregulation had played thus far in shaping the airline industry, producing lower fares that allowed more people to fly, but in a manner that felt "progressively more inconvenient." He suggested that deregulation may have contributed to dangerous declines in maintenance and safety standards and examined other elements affecting airline safety such as traffic control, weather, runway maintenance, radar and other sensing equipment, pilot and flight attendant training and disaster crews.

They were the unlikeliest of pairs--a handsome Italian crooner and a skinny Jewish monkey. The moment they got together, something clicked--and audiences saw it at once. Before long, they were as big as Elvis would be after them, grabbing an unprecedented hold over radio, television, movies, stage shows, and nightclubs. Martin and Lewis were a national craze, an American institution--and then, ten years from the day when the two men joined forces, it all ended. The two wouldn't speak again for twenty years. While both went on to forge triumphant individual careers, their parting left a hole in the national psyche, as well as in each man's heart. In a memoir by turns moving, tragic, and hilarious, Lewis recounts a fifty-year friendship, and makes a case for Dean Martin as one of the great--and most underrated--comic talents of our era.--From publisher description