David Benjamin Knihy

For a kid named Cribbsy, the month of November, 1963, was a private train wreck weeks before JFK undertook his fatal motorcade in Dallas. Cribbsy is tangled in a half-dozen romantic crises. He's hounded by malevolent dwarfs. He's under threat of suspension by a vicious vice-principal. He's at war with his English teacher. Every time he sets foot in the halls, he faces death at the hands of a delusional gridiron gladiator. Cribbsy's trials trace America's loss of innocence. Kennedy has faced down Khrushchev over Cuban missiles, but every kid grows up with the haunting certainty that his life--all life--will end beneath a mushroom cloud. As the nation mourns JFK, Cribbsy's troubles mount. He becomes an unwitting felon. He receives an unexpected overture from the yummiest girl in school. He faces a showdown with his raging nemesis. He knows what happened in the Art Room. And he has a conversation--both crushing and illuminating--with the Playmate of the Month.

David Benjamin's eponymous character in The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked grew up in the era - between child labor and Little League - when parental disregard set kids free to devise and play their own games, make their own rules, argue their own disputed calls and roam free from dawn to darkness with absolutely no adult supervision. It was a time, between the end of World War II and the wholesale intrusion of parents into child's play, that Benjamin calls "free-lance childhood." It allowed a timid, bookish and intensely observant kid to explore the outdoors, range for miles on his bicycle, go fishing, go hunting, play baseball, football, soccer, go to the movies with a fellow rascal named Chucky Dutcher and get kicked out of high-school basketball games. This was an interval in American culture that has been overlooked by historians and sociologists alike. It comes to life in vivid and often hilarious microcosm, chronicled by a gifted and often lyrical writer.

Josie Dobbs, sweet sixteen and beautiful, is everybody’s angel. Or is she?Police chief Jim Otis, fired from the Chicago Police after an affair with an underage hooker, is a lost cause. Or is he?Josie has secrets nobody in little Hercules, Wisconsin, wants to uncover. Nobody but Jim Otis.In his last month on the job, the lame-duck chief must unravel the dark side of Josie Dobbs, or a young Marine could go to jail — and innocent people might die. Otis wades into a swamp of sordid trysts and local gossip-mongers, sorting lies from truth from rumors in a dogged pursuit to find out what really happened one cold night in November at the Hercules Hardware.

Sixth-grader Henry Haddock's personal war with School Board Chairman "Scooter" McDuff starts innocently. Over breakfast one day, Henry complains that his favorite teacher has been laid off in a sudden, sneaky burst of budget cuts. Henry goes to ask the School Board to ask why. Scooter tells Henry to shut up. A week later, Scooter does it again. After that, it's a war of wills! Henry's protest eventually triggers a brawl in the high-school library, a recall petition, a battered TV reporter and the unlikely political career of high-school basketball star "Moose" Fulton, brother of Fantasia, Henry's ferocious sidekick. The town takes sides. Henry becomes the unlikely leader of the underdog faction--along with Moose and Fantasia, Charlie Mulcahy, Mr. McCloskey and the flamboyant Dexter D. Lee. Henry finds himself pitted versus the School Board, the "Thundering Three Hundred," the local radio station, the richest man in town, his sister Penelope and a German shepherd named Wagner.

The high-school gym in Hercules, Wisconsin is haunted, by a basketball player who died, tragically, on the court in 1968. John Roszak casts a dark pall in the gym and returns to spook and harass the few talented players who show up now and then at Hercules High. Roszak's latest victim, Stewart McCullough, doesn't believe in ghosts but his new girlfriend, Meryl, convinces Stewy to reach out to his personal ghost. As Stewy deals with his otherworldly specter, another-human-danger is stalking him. Clay Lutz is back in town, determined to reclaim the girl-Meryl-whom he regards as his personal property. He is willing to do anything, and hurt anyone, who stands in his way. The only person capable of protecting Stewy from Clay's seething jealousy is police chief Jim Otis. Clay's return to Hercules begins a cat-and-mouse struggle with Otis that frustrates the police chief and steadily escalates into deadly violence. Clay proves a cunning and elusive adversary to Otis, a former Chicago police detective. The dangerous game even involves Josie Dobbs, the teenage femme fatale who has been Otis' nemesis since her first appearance in Jailbait. As the basketball season progresses, Stewy and Meryl find themselves coping with mortal peril both from the living (Clay Lutz) and the dead (John Roszak), with Jim Otis as the anxious guardian of their lives and their love.

Saint Paul, Private Eye! It is written, in Matthew, that Jesus, on the cross, cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Was this all Jesus said? Who was present to hear him say anything at all? His disciples had fled in fear. Roman soldiers surrounded him. Was there a secret revealed at the Crucifixion -- lost forever because there was no one to bear witness? Paul, the "saint" who for ten years tormented the followers of Jesus, suffers visions of the Crucifixion. He is haunted by its secret. After fleeing near-death in Damascus, Paul begins a quest for one witness who can solve... ... the Golgotha murder mystery Paul's winding journey carries him far and wide throughout the Holy Land -- and beyond. He faces constant danger from a host of enemies -- from the King of Syria to the powerful brother of Jesus, known as James the Just. Paul is beaten, mobbed, knifed, shipwrecked, cast away, bewitched and flung into prison. His only "friend" is a rogue apostle named Iscariot, whose death was "greatly exaggerated." Paul's tortuous quest ends at last in Jerusalem, in the midnight gloom of Herod's Great Temple. At last, Paul meets his witness and faces the most shocking revelation of his life.

Reporter Steve Knight has stumbled into a terrorist plot to destroy Japan's Imperial family and turn Asia's model democracy into a gangster state. Along with his fierce and beautiful sidekick, Mie Nishimura, Steve joins forces with"Japan hand" Ike Greenwald to foil the terrorists. As Steve's motley crew struggles to save the Emperor, the Black Dragons dispatch assassins to kill them, too! Japan's fate comes down -- at last -- to a wild race through Tokyo, amidst a hail of bombs and bullets, in a disintegrating VW Beetle!

A polymath as well as novelist and journalist, David Benjamin, in his "weekly screeds," has ranged across subjects from sports to technology, to movies and memories,, from Paris to Tokyo to Wisconsin and beyond. This sampling of Benjamin's humor and imagination hearkens to the most esteemed forebears of the art of "1,000 fearful words," from Hazlitt to Twain to Russell Baker and Gail Collins.

Fat Vinny, the most repulsive eighth-grader in the history of Tomah, is in love. He has chosen as the apple of his eye the wrongest girl he could possibly pursue. Worse than that, he has decided to involve in his sexual awakening the only kid on earth whom he can call "friend." Fat Vinny's weird romance, accompanied by disgusting poetry, drags our hero, seventh-grade Benjamin, into a world of sex where he doesn't want to go. He has enough troubles already. Father Finucan is furious about the "incident" at eight o'clock Mass. Sister Mary Ann is plotting his destruction. He's learning "The Facts of Life" from Wes and Wally, who only know about it from dirty jokes. His "best friend" Koscal is a pain in the ass. And his big sister Peg keeps yelling at him to stay away from Fat Vinny. But every time he thinks he's free, Vinny reels him back in... to the peeping Tom incident and the lost sneaker... to the two break-ins at the priests' house... to the mad chase from the library... all the way to the high-speed climax in old man Geisendorff's stolen Thunderbird. sampling of the provocative and often hilarious essays, sketches and screeds David Benjamin has written weekly for decades. Throughout, David Benjamin embodies a dictum that irreverent essayists, from Voltaire and Twain to Dave Barry and Gail Collins, have faithfully embraced: Nothing is sacred.