Merry Christmas from Edward Harshman

  The Bookstore

Another night, it might have been a fish rainbow, a monster rainbow, or even a bad rainbow.

These stories, about rainbows and fairies and witches and ghosts and other things, were the few that Edward remembers from the days when his children were small and appreciated the magic of fairyland and the lively imagination of their father. Most of the stories that he told then, including those of Cartoonland and of the Walking Heads, were told once and are gone forever. But all of the Rainbow Stories have survived.

No publisher will accept this anthology. The vocabulary is for adults and older children, and the concepts are for young children.

But perhaps the pleasure that Edward’s children felt can be felt by other people young at heart. There is, however, a serious message. The Fairy of Good Vision, who appears in many of the Rainbow Stories, bases her behavior and even her color on the work of rebel eye doctor William H. Bates, teaching in “The Happy Rainbow” a visual exercise that helps prevent young children from acquiring the need for eyeglasses.

Take a trip to Fairyland. It’s a lovely place.

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Hate deceptive advertising?

So do I.

Harry Dreyfus just got promoted to medical director of a rehabilitation hospital after his co-workers got convicted of insurance fraud.

He replaces them with a new team and soon discovers that there is a murderer on the loose. Is it a spouse of a recently imprisoned former colleague? Someone he had just hired? One of the evasive young men who had started hanging out in the corridors? Someone else?

This mystery novel not only has a medical setting, but also relies on medical principles and knowledge for the solution to the killings. Some alternative and complementary medicine is introduced too. Expect to learn several health-care facts while you read.

Join Dr. Dreyfus as he fights hospital and other pressures and tries to identify the killer, or killers. Will he succeed? Will he survive?

This novel introduces two characters, Bruno Petroso and Randolph Sabin, who later appear in another novel, The Seven-Point Star.

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Take a fictional setting, medical knowledge,

and a fury with modern organized medicine, and what do you get? An action-adventure science-fiction novel about a brilliant but thoroughly disgruntled physician who hates the system—and who knows how to fight back.

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The dark world
of the urban poor and disabled

No commercial publisher will accept these two stories by Edward Harshman.

Llata Ecalpon is too long for a short story and too short for a novel. It describes a senior college student’s adventure in a mythical blue- collar town in which concrete thinking reigns supreme and college education is debunked.

The Unsolved Problem is commercially worthless partially because the tone of the text differs from its content. In the world of the urban destitute, the land of limited opportunity and of despair and death, two brothers, both mentally ill and homeless, rescue a paraplegic woman who is giving birth and later encounter the woman at a church. They start a foundation to help the unfortunate, converting hopelessness and depression to autonomy and confidence; but they later encounter an unexpected problem that they are powerless to solve.

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The darker world of the ignored

Christmas is the time of giving. Not just empty gestures and socially correct presents, which delight the giver in her or his meaningless social compliance but do nothing for the recipient. No, Jesus hated hypocrisy (see Matthew 23 for example), and so do I.

If you are called on to choose between giving per formally correct protocols and giving so as to maximize the value to the recipient, choose the recipient. Otherwise you are not really giving; you are participating in a ceremony to benefit only yourself. Celebrate Jesus at Christmastime; do not bow down to and worship any protocol that leaves anyone ignored.

Enough preaching. Here's my example:

Consider the unwanted woman, unwanted because she is not up to prevailing physical standards, perhaps because of disfiguring surgery and perhaps from disability. Prevailing mental-health counseling provides compassion and validation. They're good, but I want better for them.

In 1995, shortly after my first marriage broke up, I suffered a spinal-cord injury that left my upper limbs partially paralyzed (temporarily, but I didn't know that then), and wrote this monograph as a personal therapeutic exercise to work off my extreme distress. (I still have PTSD.) But a residency in PM&R not only gave me no reason to revise it, but also ignored the obvious problem completely. More recently, I learned that my approach is actually valid and helpful.

No other attempt at helping the physically nonstandard woman is known to me. My attempt to solve the problem may someday be superseded by greater minds than my own, which I welcome; but until then I am the unwilling holder of a monopoly on giving such women actual constructive help.

This book turned out to not only be a therapeutic exercise for me, but also be of genuine value for its intended audience. Look here for further information about it.

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