For All The Wrong Reasons is the moving story of the life of a Latino man struggling to make it in a white man's world. With humor and candor, Dan Benavidez takes us on a journey rich in Mexican culture and fraught with discrimination and hardship. From living in the back of a gypsy wagon, through a challenging and enlightening stint in the Army, as a businessman in war-torn Nicaragua, and through the challenges of “living brown in a white town," Dan exposes his vulnerability and struggles to become a mover and a shaker in a predominantly white man’s world while denying his own heritage. Culminating in the death of his mother, the book reveals how Dan now faces his demons when making choices “for the right reasons.”

Ad Astra is my own latest novel, the story of a young bomber pilot's journey before, during, and after World War II. Bringing together my admiration and respect for the intrepid fliers of the second world war and the aircraft they flew; forty years' experience as a private pilot; and over seventy years of experience as a human being, Ad Astra is a very personal work and truly a labor of love.

Young Gene Stoddard is desperate. He wants to be a pilot, to spend his life flying the great airliners. It’s his childhood dream, his obsession. But how does a boy trapped on a farm in rural Kansas, with parents who are barely surviving the Depression and have no money for such “nonsense” as airplanes, ever get to be a pilot?

Fate intervenes on Gene's behalf, though, first in the form of an opportunity to learn to fly courtesy of the U.S. government, and then again, under less fortunate circum-stances, with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Gene finds himself in the South Pacific flying the most advanced bombers ever created—just the kind of experience the airlines will be looking for after the war.

But war has a way of changing destinies, and it changes Gene's in more ways than one. Confronted with a dramatically different future than he expected, Gene is forced to decide what's most important to him: the dream he no longer has, or the life he can have. As he comes to terms with the choices he has to make, Gene learns dreams can come true in ways we never expect.