About the Author

For more than three decades, David Fisher has been writing about an extraordinary variety of subjects, ranging from major league baseball umpires to Nobel Prize winning biochemists. He is the author of more than 80 books, among them 24 New York Times bestsellers, and has been a frequent contributor to major magazines and newspapers. He is the only writer ever to have a work of non-fiction, a novel and a reference book offered simultaneously by the Book-of-the Month Club.He began his professional career as a staff writer for the late comedienne Joan Rivers' syndicated talk show, That Show. From there he joined Life Magazine, when it was still published weekly, becoming the youngest reporter in that magazine's history, covering primarily sports and youth culture.He began his free-lance writing career with a children's biography of Malcolm X. A year later he co-authored his first bestseller, Killer (Playboy Books) with 'Joey Black,' the first confessional written by a Mafia hit man. After writing a second bestseller with Joey Black, Hit #29, which was purchased by Paramount, as well as two additional books, he wrote the very first book about transcendental meditation, Tranquility Without Pills (Wyden Books) . He wrote several others books about the world of crime, including Louie's Widow. In 1980 John William Clouser, who had been on the FBI's Most Wanted list longer than any man in history, contacted Fisher and asked him to arrange his surrender. After surrendering on national television, Clouser and Fisher collaborated on The Most Wanted Man in America (Stein and Day) .Fisher began writing about sports in the early 1980's, co-authoring the two "laugh-out-loud bestsellers" (wrote the Times) , The Umpire Strikes Back and Strike Two (Bantam Books) as well as two additional books with legendary umpire Ron Luciano, and former Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda's bestselling autobiography, The Artful Dodger (Morrow) . He also collaborated with Eugene Klein, the man credited with inventing junk bonds to put together one of the nation's first conglomerates, The National General Corporation, and then tried to apply the lessons learned in business to pro football, in the cautionary tale, First Down and A Billion and with Basketball Hall of Fame member U of Arizona coach Lute Olson on his autobiography Lute! The Seasons of My Life.Fisher created a new reference system when he wrote and edited, What's What, A Visual Glossary of the Physical World (Hammond) which Esquire called, "The most important new reference work published in the past half-century," and which subsequently was published in nine bilingual editions, selling more than 1,000,000 copies.Fisher's first novel, The Pack, (Putnam's) was purchased by Warner Bros. and released as a feature film. His second novel, The War Magician (Coward McCann) , based on the true story of magician Jasper Maskelyne, who used the techniques of sta

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