Robert Wintner

  Lizard Blue is a novel, set mostly in Europe, where love and meaning can't quite reconcile.  
    Drifting through a life grown dreary, a man encounters a younger woman. In a glance, she restores the heat, hunger, and hopefulness of youth. Meeting again, as if by chance, they stumble over the differences between them, like age, mobility, and need. They set off for Europe, to scratch each other’s back, but the itch lingers. Agreeing to part, briefly, to refresh, she heads south to see an old friend, as he stays north, alone.

     Lizard Blue is the portrait of a man, driven to a fault, written by a true storyteller. It is a novel about lust and love, vibrant women, and a middle-age satyr who suffers love in his heart, on his way to discovery. 

"A daring look behind the scenes of tourism in Hawaii. Passages depicting open-sea crossings are vivid, and the cameos of mainland tourists are dead-on."—Publishers Weekly  

 As a Maui County Library Hot Pick and Beach Book of the Month Club Main Selection, Whirlaway resounds among charter crews.

NOTE: PG 17, this one, so fasten your seatbelts & prepare for heavy weather. We're going in. Not for the faint-hearted of any age.

critical mass kridək(ə) mas noun
1Physicsthe minimum amount of fissile material needed to maintain a nuclear chain reaction.
Critical mass may be a minimum for chain reaction or a maximum for stability. Either way, things go off. Collective consciousness and common behaviors accelerate in chaos.
Subtle change builds to drastic consequence. Mass media covers hateful simpletons gaining market share on slap diddle, shouting lies on fire. Road rage is self-expression. Stress compresses, on the way to another big bang.

Waities Waring was the first judge in US history to rule that separate but equal is not equal, but he gets no mention in the archives, because we was widely perceived as vindictive. He'd taken up with a Yankee spitfire, putting out his wife of 35 years. Charleston reacted harshly, and Waring gave back with separate but equal. Exiled to NY from Charleston, SC, Waring died there a cold, lonely, broken man 17 years after his ruling. The tale begins at the funeral, in the voice of Waring's protege, derailed, who burned a cross on Waring's lawn.

The Modern Outlaws are men convened by chance for a motorcycle trip through Montana. Understated with expressions of good taste, they suffer the common lust. Rapacious appetite for wine and women leads to thundering obtrusion on sleepy hamlets and shady dives, where they take what may be taken. Buster hides his hostility. 

Book 2 of the road saga, twenty years along from The Modern Outlaws. Aging men seek more of the same or something more.

Nine million Americans are touched by aneurysms during their lifetime. This is one story of love.

 

The three main hubs of aquarium trade devastation are Indonesia, the Philippines, and Hawaii. Each has its own sad story of political corruption and theft of natural resources to benefit a greedy, ruthless few.

Can a conflicted dive leader keep from drowning amidst a midlife crisis, a breakup, an attempted murder, and the changing of his beloved Hawaiian paradise?

Big M OK Used Car–magnate Michael Mulroney never set out to be heroic. He lives at the top, naturally, thanks to instinct, wit, and the will to win. Insolvency is not the same as poverty; poverty is for poor people. And a man of proven dexterity is not poor. He beats the practical challenges of life in the golden state—of fickle markets, lowballers, long-toothed real-estate women, name droppers, fitness compulsives, sexual-molestation charges, and the ten-percent grade up Hazel Dell on a bicycle four days in a row—at sixty!

Decades of isolation from tourism and development have left Cuba’s coral reefs among the most pristine in the world, an “exceptionalism” that stands in stark contrast to the island nation’s poverty and political situation. Famed diver/photographer Robert “Snorkel Bob” Wintner showcases these magnificent reefs with his astounding underwater images, while also capturing terrestrial life in the cities and villages of the island nation.

The year when everything needed to be experienced and tried, when innocence was tempted, played, and lost.

Neptune Speaks is packed with full-color photographs of tropical fish on every page, but this book is more than just a beautiful guide. It's a call to defend the creatures of the sea that are under attack by fierce predators--humans. The popularity of keeping tropical fish in home and office aquariums, and the overfishing of waters around the world to satisfy the demands of diners looking for ever-more exotic fare have put these amazing species in danger of disappearing entirely.

Lively and irreverent, this book is more conversation than lecture, and more social than scientific. 

The book is colorful and based in action, with insight to the lives and homes of reef fish, while pointing out a dark undercurrent now sweeping reefs clean around the world, the aquarium trade. Hawaii supplies 80% of all fish in U.S. aquaria, and many more fish for Europe and China.
Underwater is under the radar for this devastating commercial extraction with no regulation, no catch limit, no limit on the number of catchers and no protection for rare or endemic species.

Robust yet complex, these vintage domestics sparkle on the palate with innuendo and overtone.

Toucan Whisper, Toucan Sing is the story of two brothers, Antonio, a gregarious gigolo, and Baldo, a dysfunctional mute who loves nature. Both work at a resort hotel, as does Lyria, betrothed to the joyous Antonio, yet drawn to the silent one. In the tangle is a murder on the beach and extrication, Mexican style.

Ten short stories in 240 pages, what one Seattle radio interviewer called, "Really, the very best stories I've read in a long, long time."

Homunculus is a story of down-and-outers in the tradition of Charles Bukowski or Graham Greene, dealing with an expatriate American community in a small Mexican town. 

The Prophet Pasqual is set in Hawaii in modern times and deals with Hawaii's two realities. The first is the postcard-pretty one. The second is comprised of the grit, heat, pollution, greed, racism and lust in the 50th state.

Darkly comic, deeply ironic, these stories are a compelling chronical.

Robert Wintner, in a narrative voice at once powerful and lyrical, passionate and graceful, creates The Ice King as a steadfast and comforting presence in the life of a man whose childhood was forever altered by his father’s death and his own subsequent loss of place.

Solomon Kurshis literary narrative. The plot is tangible and gains clarity through practicality, recognition and surrender. Spiritual life needs truth to make things whole and money to make ends meet.