L.J. Davis

In 1992, John Malone, the brilliant, hard-nosed, and widely feared CEO of cable giant TCI, announced that the 500-channel information superhighway was imminent, and he was going to build it. The media went nuts. Companies by the hundreds, investors by the millions, politicians of all stripes, rushed to embrace this marvel of the age, this technology that would change our lives and make the savvy and the quick rich beyond the dreams of avarice.Trouble was, John Malone's interest in building the 500-channel information superhighway was largely rhetorical. He was much more interested in selling his debt-ridden company, with its notorious reputation for wretched customer service, to Ray Smith at Bell Atlantic--in what would be the largest merger in United States history. But sometimes bluffs--even $33 billion bluffs--get out of hand. As entertainment, phone, computer, and electronics companies raced to spend vast sums on interactive digital television (the miracle technology at the heart of the information superhighway), nobody stopped to answer a crucial Was John Q. Public really going to fork over his hard-earned dough to have a conversation with his television set?Witty, brilliantly reported, and wickedly revealing, The Billionaire Shell Game follows the best and the brightest of the information age--people like Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin, Wired guru Nicholas Negroponte, media mogul Barry Diller, the unpredictable genius Ted Turner, and the only man Malone truly feared, Rupert Murdoch--as they enthusiastically spend their stockholders' money in pursuit of a glittering future.L.J. Davis has written a wildly entertaining tale of greed, stupidity, and the high-tech shell game.

L.J. Davis’s 1971 novel, A Meaningful Life , is a blistering black comedy about the American quest for redemption through real estate and a gritty picture of New York City in collapse. Just out of college, Lowell Lake, the Western-born hero of Davis’s novel, heads to New York, where he plans to make it big as a writer. Instead he finds a job as a technical editor, at which he toils away while passion leaks out of his marriage to a nice Jewish girl. Then Lowell discovers a beautiful crumbling mansion in a crime-ridden section of Brooklyn, and against all advice, not to mention his wife’s will, sinks his every penny into buying it. He quits his job, moves in, and spends day and night on demolition and construction. At last he has a he will dig up the lost history of his house; he will restore it to its past grandeur. He will make good on everything that’s gone wrong with his life, and he will even murder to do it.

Hell-bent on Americanization, Mrs. Kantavski had named her son Clark and changed his last name to Kent. In Brooklyn in 1937, this had not seemd like a bad but when, a year later, the first Superman adventure appeared, the fate of the anti-hero of this hilarious picaresque was determined.

Chronicles the scientists, inventors, scientific research, and technological advances that fueled the development of electricity and explores the influence of Edison, Davenport, Morse, and Cyrus Field on today's modern high-tech world.

GETTING BY IN GREENWICH VILLAGE—WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM FRIENDS:PAULA, who arouses Probish's lust but is only interested in improving his mind so she won't have to despise him.LUVITZ, who drenches him in roach spray, then feeds him a mixture of LSD and amphetamine.STARK, the morose painter from Nebraska who sends him off to meet a rich homosexual.GOLDFARB, his landlord, who thinks he's just a slightly mixed-up Jewish boy.

Portrays the lives and business triumphs of Aristotle Onassis, who built a tanker fleet larger than most navies, and his sole heiress, Christina, who contested her father's will, pensioned off her stepmother, and seized power in the Onassis empire

Examines recent disasters in big business and banking, and criticizes the pattern of mismanagement, huge debts, and strained credit that threatens the stability of the international economy