A little Late . . . .

It is a little late, late indeed, to get a gift book for a friend, relative, or business associate for Christmas. I am writing this on Christmas Eve while my wife makes her traditional Cherry Ring, a coffee cake pastry, for our family breakfast gathering at our daughter’s home Christmas morning.

But it is not late for a book gift to yourself (it never is) or for a New Year gift to persons on your list. In my last post I told you about the informative "Frenchtown" book. Just after that got posted I learned Rick has expanded his effort and has come out with a new book about Frenchtown. I look forward to getting a copy of that one, if only to see what more there is for him to write about for that river town.

I start this post with two local authors who I have known for some time, and end with a third I have known all of his life. I picked up a book from each of the first two at the recently attended book fair that I have written about. 

Jim Gano

I learned about Jim's experience with cancer by reading his book.

I had heard he had been diagnosed some time ago, but it never registered. It should have. Not only has he been a friend, a client, and an active member of our business community, but I have been impacted by cancer about as much as one can be without actually having it himself. One out of three people have experienced cancer directly or indiirectly in their life time. We should all be aware when we know someone hit with that terrible disease. You cannot beat a health issue without a positive attitude. Friends can help.

My mother died in 1972 after losing her second fight with cancer. Treatment has been much improved since then. But the disease is not less devastating for the people who have it, and their friends and loved ones. My mother was a young widow when her diagnosis hit all of us.

A long-time friend, a nurse who had helped care for me when I was born with pyloric stenosis, moved in with my mother for a time to help her physically and emotionally. I drove my mother to New York City for treatments that were not available at the time at our medical center in Hunterdon. For the six following years we thought her condition had been caught early enough, and that she, the fighter she was, had recovered. But cancer came back as it so often does. 

This time she moved in for a time with my cousin, a registered nurse. More driving to New York at the time I was getting my law practice started. This time cancer metastasized to her brain. This time she lost her fight.

When she died my wife and I became involved in the American Cancer Society. My wife became president of the Hunterdon chapter of the New Jersey Division. She led Hunterdon county to achieving the honor of raising the most money per person of any county in New Jersey. I became a volunteer lawyer reviewing estate administrations in which the Cancer Society was named a beneficiary. 

More recently the best doctor I have been treated by, and have ever known, lost his battle with cancer. He suffered through two painful bone marrow transplants, went back to work, and then died. He was a friend and a client. Not only was he a great loss to me as my doctor, and as a friend, but he was an immeasurable loss to our Hunterdon Community. The best and most dedicated doctor I have ever known.

With that background I should have been more attentive to the news about Jim and his cancer. I cannot think of anything I likely could have done for him, but perhaps a prayer or two or perhaps just paying some attention is something I could have done. Something any of us can do for friends facing that terrible disease is paying attention. Most of us are not good at dealing with or trying to help a friend facing such a disease.

In the book Jim says he has always been a person with a positive mental attitude. He said:

A lot of your success in your treatment and in life, I believe, will have a lot to do with your attitude. . .

This fullness in my heart has not left, and it really pisses me off to think how much of my life I took for granted before my diagnosis. I never once thought about what it would be like for some of these people if I wasn’t here. I never thought of all I would miss if I wasn’t here. Man, if you need something to motivate you into getting better, stew on those thoughts for a few minutes. . . .

I will live. I will live my life the way I always have, by getting involved and trying to make a difference in the lives of those around me. And I will do all this for as long as I humanly can. I also hope this book and these thoughts have made a difference in your life. I hope that when I’m gone at some point someone stops and thinks of me and says, “he made a difference in my life.” I also hope that I have many more productive years here on earth to do just that. All I know is, “I’m Not Done Yet!”

His book is important. I believe. his positive attitude, and his writing the book, was part of Jim's recovery. It is also an inspiration and help for many who are facing what he faced. I recommend you read it.

David B. Watts

The second book I picked up at the book fair is by another old friend. David has written several books. His first book, "The Accidental PI" is about how he became a private investigator. (You might want to read that too) Not only is it an interesting story about how a young man, discharged from the military, in the 60s, who was not moving in any particular direction to get a job, stumbled on advice from a friend that the local police were looking for people like him. He became a policeman. Published in 2019 he describes it as “A Private Investigator's Fifty-Year Search for the Facts” I knew David for years before he decided to become an author. He worked with me a number of times as an investigator to get the facts in cases I have been involved in.

One of those cases involved a situation where the driver of a large truck, owned by a company I had represented in several matters, ran over a man. His head was crushed. Obviously he died. The driver, seeing in his miror what had happened, left the scene.

Working together David and I successfully defended the driver and the owner of the truck. Our driver ended with a 90-day loss of driver license penalty for leaving the scene of an accident in which a man was killed. David chronicled that situation in his Accidental PI book. I have always enjoyed working with David. My clients have benefitted from his service. I am happy to be in his book in a chapter where he tells our story.

His recent book, which I have just read, Sex and Souls For Sale: A Chilling Tale of Child Sex Trafficking in Modern America, set in New Jersey and New York, is a work of fiction, but is not less interesting than his first book.

His descriptions of the seedier side of the cultural revolution during that era is riveting. His two lead characters, private investigators, are on the case involving the Russian mob or crime family, a corrupt police office who turns out alright, and others as they rescue the children. Perhaps I give too much away. I won’t tell what happens to the mob leader. You have to read the book to find that out for yourself.

I have always enjoyed the light reading and presentation of a serious topic. Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler have given us interesting books and characters. Who is more interesting than Sherlock Homes. Of course there is always Ellery Queen, a pseudonym created in 1928 by the American detective fiction writers Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee.

David Watts is local. Read him.

Jon P. Roth

The third book is special to me. My son took his college degree in literature, his mostly self-taught career in computers and computer engineering and management, and wrote a story that is currently relevant, frightening, suspenseful, and if you are interested in the future of the internet and computers, and life, is about people who plot to take over the internet and finally to sell you oxygen to breath.

In college, roommates Birch and Angel coded software viruses, releasing their so-called “mustangs” into the wild of the Internet, for the adrenaline rush of skirting international law and beer bottle clinks for getting away with it. They lose touch after graduation, until the masterminds behind the most audacious heist in history threaten to kill them both.

A reviewer on the web site Goodreads says:

Birch, Mind of the Dragonflies is a riveting and thought-provoking work of speculative fiction that fuses high-stakes technology, corporate intrigue, and human morality into a seamless narrative. Jon P. Roth masterfully crafts a world where innovation, power, and greed collide, exploring the consequences of unchecked technological control on humanity’s most basic needs.

The novel’s protagonists, Birch and Angel, are brilliantly written, complex, flawed, and deeply human. Roth’s storytelling is both tense and reflective, guiding readers through cyber-heists, ethical dilemmas, and a race against time that keeps you on edge. This debut is not just a suspenseful thrill ride, it’s an intelligent exploration of power, loyalty, and the cost of human ambition, making it a must-read for fans of techno-thrillers and speculative fiction alike.

2025 Foreword Magazine, Inc. reports

Dangers are afoot in the technology sector, but two heroes are determined to curb them in the imaginative, inspiring science fiction novel Birch.

In Jon P. Roth’s futuristic novel Birch, a computer hacker melds his coding skills with his observations on nature.

Graduated and working, best friends Birch and Angel stop making the college prank information-snatch-and-share computer programs that they know could get them in trouble. But as they question the violent video games and surveillance drones they each develop in exchange for substantial compensation in Silicon Valley, they begin to use their college creation as a secret means of communicating. Together, working undercover, they reprogram the drones into goodwill agents.

Birch and Angel narrate alternating chapters. While Birch gives up his possessions and rides a motorcycle to an unknown destination, cutting all ties to his video game job, Angel gets paid more and more, and is swept into the insatiable culture he once complained about. And programming drones are just a fraction of the world domination his company plans: Angel’s boss threatens him and others; there are acts of retaliation and torture. The pressure Angel operates under explains Birch’s escape, and Birch’s escape appears all the more impressive and implausible as Angel succumbs to pressure.

Birch’s chapters become more introspective the longer he is away. He contemplates how to apply the values he learns in the countryside to coding. He shares his story with a woman he learns to trust, engages in physical labor, and consumes less. He is philosophical and sometimes meanders. Meanwhile, Angel’s chapters become more succinct as his job leaves little room for reflection. He and his wife see each other less often; she becomes suspicious of him.

Friends and colleagues who represent the social extremes of city and country, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, Angel and Birch are standout heroes who each require the other’s support. Though opposites, they present a united front. Their enemies are everyone’s enemies and their supporters are everyone’s loved ones.

The men’s different settings also highlight their growing divide. Angel is surrounded by luxury items, while Birch makes a rustic home. Toggling between their two lifestyles, the book achieves balance, though it does tip toward Birch in the end. His musings gain traction when Angel invites him to undermine the drones, leading to a satisfying resolution.

In the science fiction novel Birch, clever, mindful technology workers help to plan a better future.

Locally, Audrey Blumberg, of TAPINTO Flemington/Raritan interviewed the author and wrote earlier this year that a 1981 graduate of Hunterdon Central Regional High School, Jon Roth has released a new book, “Birch, Mind of the Dragonflies.”

Following several months of drones flying over Hunterdon County, Roth said the book is relevant because the dragonflies in the novel are drones. It is about an effort by a group of people to take over the worldwide Internet, starting with a massive number of drones that are solar powered and can take care of each other. . . .

The main character, Birch, works in a Silicon Valley gaming company, and his compatriot, Angel, works as a military and industrial contractor near the national lab in New Mexico. Angel finds that the project he is assigned to lead, an airborne drone network designed to support military battlefield operations, is really a group looking to seize control of and own the global Internet.

Angel, Roth said, realizes he must thwart the heist, and Birch works to grapple with a recurring nightmare from genetic memories of trauma, while he reconciles it with his role in creating ultra brutal video games.

“The idea for the story came to me over the course of my own career as a software engineer,” he said. “As I learned and worked with networking and cloud technology, artificial intelligence, robotics and nano tech, I allowed my imagination to concoct possible future states in these areas and weave them into a story. It happened organically over time.”

“Now clusters of drones are spotted over New Jersey and other places around the globe,” he added. “If you think these developments are radical and intriguing, I think you will want to read through the ending.”

Roth said he has been writing short stories and novels ever since his years at Daniel K. Reading Middle School. At Hunterdon Central, he studied creative writing in English classes, before he went on to major in English and creative writing at Middlebury College in Vermont.

In college, he played lacrosse and soccer as he did in high school. He studied English and computer science.

“After college, I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, lived briefly in Vermont where I was a teacher in the Woodstock jail, then in Portland, where I worked in an aerial photography company that used small helicopters, then in Michigan where I founded a technology consultancy and software firm,” he said.

His is the only book I know of for which the author designed the cover. He did share the art award when he grauated from Hunterdon Central High School.

His book is available on Amazon.