23 October 2021 - TOP BOOK REVIEW FOR 'GOTCHA!'

 

TOP BOOK REVIEW FOR

 'GOTCHA!'

G'day folks,

My latest book has received a great review from one of Australia's top book reviewers, Anastasia Gonis. This review appears on 'Kid's Book Review', and I'm grateful for their tireless work in providing reviews for authors.

This is the fourth book in the 'Kick-Ass' series, but I suggest you read the three previous books: 'Kick-Ass Tyler', 'Better Than Sliced Bread', and 'Life sucks!'. 

 

 Here is the Review:

 The evolution of Sam Tyler from student to professional Barrister makes a fantastic read. Her character is a powerful role model for young adults; generous-hearted, down-to-earth, inspiring, and lovable.

Clancy Tucker’s latest novel, Gotcha! the fourth book in the Kick Ass series, finds Sam on her last day at Folkestone University. Although it’s a happy time, Sam reflects on all the things she achieved and the people that supported her on her journey to who she has become.

At nearly twenty-two, Sam has completed her Bachelor of Criminal Law with Honours, and passed her Bar exam. She is very proud of her personal accomplishments and is looking forward to the next chapter of her life.

Her new job with a prestigious law firm, sees T-shirts and jeans replaced with a professional look. Her new apartment in the best part of town – a gift from her gran, promises new friends and neighbours.

Sam settles into a routine quickly and confidently, but finds that juggling work and a long distance relationship with her boyfriend Mick, is no easy task. Mick’s family will make life-changing decisions concerning their farm, Karaminga, which is struggling financially due to the drought. A joyful surprise adds to the reinvention of Sam Tyler.

At work, Sam cuts her teeth on a complex case that holds many unanswered questions. It is a class action against an unscrupulous tractor company distributing through Australia and Asia.

Sharp as a tack, analytical and questioning, Sam delves deep, above and beyond normal expectations, to dig up the truth from the contradictory evidence she is given to examine.  She discovers that the law is not always adhered to, even by lawyers, and uncovers corruption in the corridors of power where manipulation is a tool used without conscience.

Determined to expose her unethical associate even after she is threatened with payback, Sam refers to her professional network; connections made during her lengthy public recovery from cancer, to confirm her line of investigation.

Although absorbed with her legal commitments, Sam finds time to teach karate to the adults and children of her diverse community. Intervening in a violent domestic dispute, and later disarming a man in a public place using her defence skills, she fulfills her personal commitment to always help others.

When her associate is taken seriously ill during a crucial time in the court proceedings, Sam must step up and take control. Determined to bring the scoundrel down, although inexperienced, can she convince the judge with her well-constructed cross-examination?

The court scenes are thrilling and well-researched. Tucker has created another riveting and detailed novel built around important social issues. As always, his characters’ voices are the conduit for his inherent belief in helping others, doing what is right, and giving people a second chance. 

 

 WANT A COPY?

Anyone wishing to purchase a signed paperback copy can email me at: 

clancy_tucker@hotmail.com

This book is also available as an e-Book. Click on the Amazon link below: 

AMAZON

 

Clancy's comment: Thank you, Anastasia. Your blood is worth bottling. This book is ideal for teenagers or adults, but especially for young women. The main character, Sam, is inspiring.

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12 September 2021 - VOLTAIRE - A WISE WRITER AND PHILOSOPHER

 

VOLTAIRE

 - A WISE WRITER & PHILOSOPHER -

 

G'day folks,

As he lay dying on this day, the great French writer Voltaire noticed that the lamp next to his bed was violently flickering and flaring up. "What? The flames already?" he quipped. They were the last words he spoke. Earlier, when a priest asked him to renounce Satan he refused, allegedly declaring: "This is no time to make any more enemies!"

Both anecdotes are of questionable authenticity but they so fit the personality of this remarkable man that they have been attributed to him in many quarters without hesitation.

Born in Paris as François-Marie Arouet in 1694, he was to become a novelist, poet, dramatist, philosopher, satirist and historian. Writing under the pen-name Voltaire he was one of the greatest writers that France has produced, but his caustic wit and unconventional ideas on religion, ethics and the State often got him into trouble.

In 1716 he was exiled from Paris for a short term after writing poems that mocked the French Regent's family. His banishment proved to be ineffective, however, because a year later he produced more verse suggesting that the Regent and his daughter enjoyed an incestuous relationship. As a result he was imprisoned in the Bastille for 11 months.

After a couple more run-ins with the authorities Voltaire went to live in England for three years. But the French Government continued to pursue their troublesome citizen, censoring or suppressing much of his work and ordering some of his books to be burned. In 1734 Voltaire made a decisive break from France by moving to Switzerland where he was to spend much of his later life.

He was able to afford such extravagance and live comfortably thanks to the French lottery. Voltaire had teamed with mathematician Charles Marie de La Condamine and other gamblers to exploit a loophole in the way the lottery was run so that their syndicate repeatedly won huge prizes and they all became very rich.

In 1778 he returned to Paris for the first time in nearly 30 years to oversee the production of one of his plays, but within a few months he was dead at the age of 83.

Catholic priests repeatedly visited this lifelong critic of organised religion in the hope of persuading him to retract his opinions and make a deathbed confession. As far as is known, they failed.

An outspoken advocate of civil liberties, Voltaire wrote more than 2,000 books and pamphlets and thousands of letters. He was one of those writers who was adept at producing memorable one-liners.

Examples:

"I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

"This body which was called, and still is called, the Holy Roman Empire, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

Clancy's comment: He certainly sounded like a sharp man. Two-thousand books!

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27 May 2021 - INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT MARK TWAIN

 

INTERESTING FACTS

 ABOUT MARK TWAIN

G'day folks,

 February 2, 1863 — After failing to strike it rich prospecting for gold and silver, an enterprising young American on this day wrote a humorous travel story for the Territorial Enterprise, a newspaper serving Virginia City, Nevada. He was Samuel Longhorne Clemens and the pen-name he chose to use for the first time was . . . Mark Twain.

By his mid-thirties he had become one of the most popular writers in America and with novels such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn his fame was to spread worldwide.

A great story-teller both in print and in real life, his distinctive narrative style was funny, irreverent, often satirical and he always took delight in deflating those puffed up with their own self-importance.

 Clemens was born in 1835, the sixth child of a poverty-stricken family which moved, when he was four years old, to Hannibal, a bustling Missouri town on the banks of the Mississippi. But when he was just 12, Clemens’s father died, plunging the family into virtual destitution and forcing the boy to give up school and find a job.

He became an apprentice printer at the Hannibal Courier, but received no pay, just food. Things improved three years later when he got a job as a printer and part-time editor and writer at the Hannibal Western Union, but Clemens temporarily abandoned newspapers in 1857 when, at 21, he was taken on as a cub-pilot aboard a steamboat. It was a dream he had nurtured for years as he watched the whistle-tooting vessels call three times a day at Hannibal.

Two years later he was a qualified pilot and immensely enjoying his highly paid work plying the shoals and channels of the great river. Sadly for him, but fortunately for literature, it was not to last. The Civil War broke out in 1861 and civilian traffic on the river was stopped.

So that year he boarded a stagecoach and headed for Nevada and California hoping to find a vein of gold or silver. He failed, and in 1862, needing a job, he became a reporter on the Territorial Enterprise. There, he began churning out news stories and sketches, adopting his now celebrated pen-name, derived from a call on the riverboats when measuring the depth of the water. It was considered that a steamboat needed a depth of 12 feet for safe passage and this was represented by the second mark on a line thrown overboard to gauge the river depth. When the safety mark was indicated, the call “Mark Twain” (mark two) was shouted out.

Another of Mark Twain’s epigrams decreed that “there are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.”

But perhaps his most famous quote came after a newspaper mistakenly published his obituary. Twain is alleged to have quipped: "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

Sad though it is to debunk a myth, Twain never actually said that. Well, not quite. What happened was that in May, 1897 journalist Frank Marshall White of the New York Journal contacted Twain who was on tour in London for comment about reports that the writer was on his deathbed.

Twain replied: "I can understand perfectly how the report of my illness got about. I have even heard on good authority that I was dead. A cousin was ill in London two or three weeks ago, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness. The report of my death was an exaggeration."

Samuel Clemens certainly belonged to the group of people who accomplish things. Just before he died he wrote: "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together; they must go out together’.”

His wish was granted. Clemens died of a heart attack the day after the comet appeared at its brightest in 1910.

 

Clancy's comment: I wish I'd met him. 

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