Robert Brown Butler

Here is a saga of the Sundering Sixties: how Kennedy's Peace Corps mission to "make the world a better place" was fractured by Johnson's Vietnam War into opposing factions that since have festered in our nation's marrow in a manner remindful of the fall of Rome. When young Gideon Gust, facing a miserable life in the derelict dells of his natal Appalachia, learns of a jungle paradise in Venezuela "where everything is perfect", he embarks on an overland odyssey that mirrors the aspirations of every disenchanted soul when something better calls elsewhere. With his windshield as a looking glass, he enters a world filled with lovers, drug dealers, con artists, insurrectionists, bullets, a timely nun, hopeless poverty one moment and ageless paradise the next, often amid the very alive ruins of an ancient civilization. His search, in which he discovers himself more than anything else, chronicles the social shaping of an Everyman that is relevant in any time on any soil.

Gideon's journey should appeal to anyone who enjoys a road story, a love story, a history of an era that profoundly influences our own, a story of how a despairing person finds his place in the world, and a novel that is inspiringly environmental —all in 104,000 words.

Due to its broad social and historical canvas, this novel resembles Steinbeck's epic, The Grapes of Wrath. You could call Gideon Gust the Tom Joad of southern Mexico. The novel also twins Cheryl Strayed's Wild in how it begins with Gideon's mother's death (same age, same killer) that sends him on his search (though he doesn't lose six toenails along the way). This work also has the makings of a major environmental novel since National Geographic, Jan 2016, page 2, said,"A new religion based on the environment could emerge in the next decade or two." This book does this today.

This eye-opening inquiry innovatively describes the elements of visual composition in a manner that is simple to grasp and encompasses the full range of visual phenomena. Its perceptual bedrock, firm as the physiology of your eyes, is that it describes nearly 60 visual axioms as crisply as theorems in a geometry book, and its examples include some of the finest art ever created. It is for anyone who is an artist, who works with artists, who simply enjoys looking at pretty pictures —and classrooms everywhere. As such this ocular adventure, in addition to inspiring visual aficionados of every kind, is a practical instrument that can increase your productive thinking in many ways, it can foster the important business of daily life, and it fulfills an established need in the affairs of society.

The book's seven chapters are:

1. Compose an area according to PERCEPTUAL LAWS OF COMPOSITION.

2. Create the illusion of depth on a flat surface with MONOCULAR DEPTH CUES.

3. Create the illusion of movement on a static surface with LINEAR MOTION CUES.

4. Liven a composition with CONTRASTS OF COLOR.

5. Compose a scene in terms of a particular ARTISTIC STYLE.

6. Dramatize a subject's nature with methods of  VISUAL ELOCUTION.

7. Challenge conventional concepts of reality with VISUAL TRICKS.

Believe it or not, there is a better way to design computer typefaces, ones that are easier to use, more versatile, and beautiful as well. Consider BuGlobal. It is superior to standard computer typefaces because:

1. You can type eighty more characters that don't appear in standard computer typefaces. This includes every letter and every diacritic mark that appears in more than 80 English-variant languages worldwide. You can also type the diacritic marks and many already-existing characters more simply than in standard faces.

2. Its characters are aerodynamically easier to read and more restful on your eyes than those in other typefaces.

3. You can create dozens of fancy arabesques to make your typing look more attractive.

4. You do nothing different to install and use this typeface than you do with standard faces.

5. BuGlobal's user's guide, A Lovely Face, describes how to type each character and when to use them.

In a mystery the likes of which Agatha Christie would struggle to match, Hod Hawksbill, a retired journalist, limps on a cane that contains a powerful digital antenna that can record the President's Oval Office conversations from outside the White House. Lurking as a leaker par excellence, Hawksbill reveals how President Conan Cain uses his office to make billions of dollars, how he betrays our country to our most menacing global enemy, and how his closest allies grow to despise him and try to assassinate him —while Democracy totters as an innocent bystander. Hawksbill's ceaseless sleuthing steers our principled but perishable democracy from being ruled by a money-hungry despot and his corrupt cronies.

In this intimately immersive saga you will feel like you're a character in the story and are playing a supporting role in unfolding the plot. As the opaque becomes clear, this novel affirms that the freedoms spelt in our Constitution are more than desirable: they foster a prosperous comity in our citizenry. End these freedoms, and the prosperity Americans have known for decades will end.

Due to events that occurred near the end of Trump's administration, I intend to add more text to this novel. Hence, until further notice this literary work is unfinished.

LOVERS OF WRITING, This handbook describes an exciting new way to write well: how to create fifty common literary devices whenever you want. In a manner analogous to how a carpenter would describe each tool he uses to build a sturdy chair, this book describes each literary tool you would use to build sturdy prose —and it does this so clearly that you will know when and how to use each device the instant your writing calls for it. Repeat this technique fifty times, and you have a literary tool box filled with such implements as … Increase Verb Density … Entertain with Humor … Create Suspense with Synecdoche … Inflate Meaning with Understatement … Add Meaning with Sentence Fragments … Paint Pictures with Words … Write Lively Dialog … and dozens more! Each lesson includes one or more passages by usually famous authors that exemplify how to use each literary device to greatest effect —and these passages alone are worth the book's price.

Here the delight of defeating a disaster awaits you . . . .

This lifesaving volume describes how to cope with more than twenty different kinds of disasters. It also addresses a disaster's biggest danger —which is not destruction but disruption. Death and damage may make the news, but usually far more lives are disrupted than destroyed. Witness the tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, in 2011. In an area less than a mile wide and 22 miles long, 158 people died —but within thirty miles of this path of calamity, 120,000 citizens whose bodies and abodes were unscratched were profoundly disrupted by the carnage, loss of power, closed roads, and empty gas pumps and store shelves. Miles from the calamity's core, such deprivation and disorder can cause you to eat poisoned food, drink polluted water, become fatally infected from a small cut, live in total darkness between dusk and dawn, and be trapped by debris in every direction.

Hence this book, in addition to listing the vital foods, tools, and other "calamity commodities" you will need when misfortune comes knocking on your door, describes how to perform those everyday tasks that will keep you alive: How to cook, wash the dishes, clean your clothes, bathe, go to the bathroom, and keep everything sanitary when you have no power or pure water. These are the links that in times of peril form a chain of survival.

This book is also innovatively formatted into chronological sections titled Well Before, Days Before, Just Before, Suddenly, During, Just After, Well After, and Long After. These timeframes underlie how you psychologically confront any disaster and how you can best prepare for, endure, and recover from them. 

This book further describes how to construct a strategic part of your home or workplace so in a disaster it will be nearly indestructible. For what use is it to have everything you would need in a time of peril if where you would keep and use it is destroyed? Hence this book, written by an architect, provides you with architectural drawings you can take to a professional designer or builder.

This book also insists that to overcome a disaster you needn't be young or strong. During two major disasters the author lived through, he performed many tasks appearing in these pages when he was past the age of seventy. Absent youth and strength, he exercised the kind of creativity and cleverness everyone has regardless of age, strength, or gender.

This book also declares that you do not need weapons, wilderness survival skills, or knowledge of hand-to-hand combat to live through a disaster. Instead it describes how to hue from the quarry of solid knowledge and energize your imagination in ways that will tilt the odds of danger from being forever against you to being always in your favor. When facing these challenges, far more citizens realize the need for friendship and teamwork and try to help each other, and would rather be known as Samaritans than Survivalists.

This book has won nine literary awards

With this 456-page Britannica in hand, you will borrow the brains of one of America's foremost authorities on architecture in ways that will make your interior life more comfortable, economical, and trouble-free. With every roof you live and work under, this thick book will help you fix old problems, keep everything running smoothly, and fend off future problems before they occur. Among dozens of other ideas, you will know how to make a room smaller and more comfortable at the same time, how to choose the best lighting for each interior you inhabit, how to make your home or workplace safe from fire and other dangers —and instead of feeling subservient to architects and contractors, you will rule them. This volume further explains what green architecture is; hence its subtitle is In Shades of Green. As such this publication describes how to harness solar, wind, and other natural energies that may be around your house, and how our society can best achieve a sustainable architecture in today's ecologically ravaged world

TITLES OF BOOKS

1. The Power of Babel: Typeface User's Guide for BuBabel, © 2004, 98 pages.

2. BuLletin Typeface User's Guide: A Headline Version of BuBabel, © 2004, 56 pages.

3. BuSabreur Typeface User's Guide: A Serif Typeface, © 2004, 82 pages.

4. BuMonde Typeface User's Guide: A Sanserif Typeface, © 2004, 84 pages.

5. BuEuclid Typeface User's Guide: A Greek Letter/Math Symbol Typeface, © 2004, 88 pages.

6. Bu2H/HB Typeface User's Guide for Bu2H & BuHB, Two Architectural Hand-Lettering Typefaces, © 2004, 88 pages.

7. BuNovelty Typeface User's Guide, Seven Novelty Typefaces, © 2004, 32 pages.

During my earliest architectural days, whether in college drafting rooms or commercial offices, every plan I drew was blanketed with notes in which every letter and symbol was drawn by hand —my hand. Drafting these atoms of communication roused in me a fascination with how their hair-thin lines could evoke the subtlest cerebrations of anyone who would read them. Whether scribed with pencils or pens, their lines of text engendered in my mind an enduring fascination with typography.

Several decades later came computers, which supplanted lettering by hand with lettering by keys. Beginning in the late 1990s with my authoring five thick books on architectural engineering for McGraw-Hill, I designed their computer typefaces, which required creating an entirely different format for these typefaces that contained all the math and science letters and symbols that appeared in these technical books. After they were published, I used my newly developed computer typeface format as the basis for designing several typefaces that I used for everything when I chaired my hands before my keys. Since these typefaces included many more useful keys than appears in standard computer typefaces, in order to easily recall my crafted ciphers' strokes and uses, I wrote seven thin guidebooks that described what they were like and when to use them.

SOME TYPEFACES DESIGNED BY the AUTHOR

TITLES OF BOOKS

1. Architectural and Engineering Calculations Manual, © 1985, 464 pages.

2. Standard Handbook of Architectural Engineering, © 1998, 1,070 pages.

3. Architectural Engineering Design: Structural Systems, © 2002, 722 pages.

4. Architectural Engineering Design: Mechanical Systems, © 2002, 812 pages.

5. Architectural Formulas Pocket Reference, © 2002, 514 pages.

6. Architectural Engineers' Platinum Edition includes the entire Standard Handbook of Architectural Engineering in both print and electronic formats plus a CD of more than 900 computerized formulas.

These references enable architects, designers, engineers, and contractors to select and size virtually every functional component (beams, columns, pipes, wires, ducts, and so forth) that exists in almost any building from shed to skyscraper anywhere in the world. Each thick volume bulges with hundreds of informative ink drawings, tables, graphs, and schedules; they include chapters on design, structure, climate control, plumbing, electricity, illumination, and acoustics; and the text for each component describes the essential criteria for its design, gives the formulas, and explains each unknown. Best of all, volumes 2, 3, and 4 include computerized disks that enable a user to solve each equation with lightning speed. With this instant consultant in hand, no longer will you need to perform tedious calculations, refer to shelves of other texts, or relearn subjects forgotten long ago —and you'll do a day's work in an hour.

The Ecological House is a practical and philosophical tour de force, a thought-provoking and possibly lifesaving book, with a multitude of new and environmentally imaginative solutions to the diverse and interrelated problems of housing. This lively, topical, dramatically illustrated, and often poetic book will substantially enhance your quality of domestic living —from locating a house most advantageously on its site, to designing its interior spaces most efficiently, to enclosing its spaces with economical and durable materials, to minimizing the energy that would keep you comfortable year-round. Here is everything you ever wanted to know about the house you may dream of having at an affordable cost in these environmentally challenging times.