Hollywood 1940, a pre-pubescent town, adorned with orange groves, pretty girls hoping to make it big in the movies, and gangsters like Bugsy Siegel, finding fertile ground.
The Great Depression may be over but war is on the horizon as a young man, Guff, with a peculiar talent for remembering numbers and patterns arrives with his friend, Nick, aka Picnic, a light-fingered pickpocket. The Grauman's Chinese, the movie studios, his girlfriend, Julie, and the warm sun backdrop the events of the plot. Drafted, Guff's prowess takes him to encryption, German secrets, General George Patton, and the atom bomb. The decade's tumultuous events provide spice to Guff's adventures. It is all true except for those parts that aren't.
Kosoff, Carole Eglash: - "Carole Eglash-Kosoff is a novelist, playwright, and documentary film maker. She lives and writes in Valley Village, California. She graduated from UCLA and spent her career teaching, writing, and traveling to more than seventy countries. In 2006, following the death of her husband, mother, and brother within one month, she spent part of two years teaching in the black townships of South Africa. Her first book, The Human Spirit - Apartheid's Unheralded Heroes (www.thehumanspirit-thebook.com), tells the stories of an amazing men and women who devoted their lives during the worst years of apartheid to help the children, the elderly, and the disabled of the townships. These people cared when no one else did and their efforts continue to this day. The Human Spirit was adapted as a play and received considerable acclaim when it was presented in 2013.An avid student of history, she researched the decades preceding and following the Civil War for nearly three years, including time in Louisiana, the setting for her novels, When Stars Align (www.whenstarsalign-thebook.com) and its sequel, Winds of Change (www.windsofchange-thebook.com). The novels chronicle the interracial love story of Thaddeus, a mixed-race boy, and Amy, a white girl, at a time when such a relationship could get them both killed. They are stories of war, reconstruction, and racism, but most of all stories of hope. In 2015 it was produced as a stage play. Reviews were universally positive. Winds of Change follows the characters of When Stars Align into the decades that closed out one century and led us into the next, decades that saw the introduction of the automobile, the airplane, movies, and the telephone as well as the Spanish-American War, and World War I.Her next book was By One Vote. It is twelve true stories of amazing events that shaped American history as the result of a single deciding vote. A sizzle reel of this book is available on YouTube at Link: http: //youtu.be/tlDBJc7JUEQ. Her novel, Sex, Drugs & Fashion, deals with the turbulent Southern California fashion industry in the 1980's where she had worked for many years and is currently being developed as a mini-series."
