What BOOK are you reading right now?

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

Fallingwater Rising is the biography of the most famous American house of the twentieth century--Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, culled from hundreds of interviews, letters, and contemporary references by an internationally recognized specialist in the history of architecture.

When he got the commission to design the house, in 1934, Wright was nearing 70. He was living in professional isolation, his early fame long gone. Like so many Depression-era Americans, he had no new work in sight. Into his orbit stepped Edgar Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department-store mogul and philanthropist with the burning ambition to build a world-famous work of architecture.


it was an unlikely collaboration: the Jewish merchant who had no lasting concern for modern architecture and the brilliant modernist who was paranoid about Jews--among many fictive enemies. But the two men produced an extraordinary building of lasting architectural significance that brought international fame to them both, and gained Wright the status of the greatest architect of the twentieth century.


GUIDE for a dozen discussion points that may be helpful to you. Or contact Toker for specific questions, like "What got you started on this book?"

Interest is growing in other foreign editions of FALLINGWATER now that the Chinese edition appeared in 2009. The two countries that are most interested are Japan and Germany. Please contact the author if you have any leads in either of those countries.



Fallingwater Rising is a work that goes far beyond architecture to depict the United States in one of its most desperate eras. Involving key figures of the 1930s like Frida Kahlo, Henry R. Luce, William Randolph Hearst, Albert Einstein, Ayn Rand, and President Franklin Roosevelt, Fallingwater's story shows us how Kaufmann's house became not just Wright's masterpiece but a fundamental icon of American life. Here is popular history at its best.

Fallingwater Rising asks three basic questions:
•By what process did Wright create the design?
•What drove Kaufmann, an architectural conservative, to suddenly embrace such a radical and risky project?
•And why, having together created one of the most important houses of the twentieth century, could Wright and Kaufmann never build anything again?
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:from Tokers marketing web page .

It was Kauffman who got WRight out of his 10 year self imposed isolation (based upon his fragile ego). s was said of him by a noted architect in the 1920's. "Wright I one of our best 19th century architects. THAT pissed Wright off mightily.

The "marketing" of Fallingwater nationally and internationally was what Kauffman had on his mind when he began the stormy partnership with WRight,.

Often "Creative Fiction" is as interesting as a telephone book or is rife with cow dung. This one is as well researched and documented as any science text and is quite a page turner (Unlike Lincoln-A Life)

If people want to read what I write, ossobuco, they are free to do so. If they don't that is fine too. I post at 100s of internet sites, have literally millions of readers. I have dozens of books now in cyberspace. I am not your occasional writer who posts little snippets for the blogosphere.

Letter writing and literary communication has taken-on a whole new context and meaning in cyberspace for me after some 50 years of writing letters in real space: 1964 to 2014. Since emails emerged by sensible and insensible degrees in the last two decades, 1994 to 2014, literary communication has been revolutionized. In some ways, this new form of literary exchange is not unlike previous decades and centuries when letter writing was one of the major forms of communication in society. At least this has become true for some writers like myself who utilize cyberspace as their central medium of publicizing their literary wares: books and ebooks, essays and posts at internet sites, narrative and expository details and accounts.

I could spend all my time now writing emails: (i) short and pithy, a line or two; (ii) of medium length, say, a paragraph or two, and (iii) long pieces of a page or more. But, since I have other literary interests, since I have reinvented myself in recent years---and am now a writer and author, poet and publisher, editor and researcher, online blogger and journalist, reader and scholar, I try to keep that form of communication, emails and letters, to an absolute minimum.

If old friends wonder why I do not send them the short and snappy emails that I used to send to them at their email address, or at their Facebook page, or at some other internet site, this is the reason. It is a reason I elaborate on in some detail in the paragraphs below. This explanation is, in part at least, part of the general articulation of my business plan, of the literary industry, of my cyberspace MO, that has come to occupy my leisure-time, my retirement years, as I head to the age of 70 in less than 7 months--on 23 July 2014.

If readers here get tired of my posts, as you indicate ossobuco, I will just retire for a week or two, or a month or a year. I do that at many places in cyberspace when people make it clear that they have had enough.-Ron

But, since I have other literary interests, since I have reinvented myself in recent years---and am now a writer and author, poet and publisher, editor and researcher, online blogger and journalist, reader and scholar ...

That's impressive, that you're able to remember a poem when you were 11.