Daniel Paisner – författare

In 1956, Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz stepped away from a successful medical practice and began a lifelong surfing odyssey that grew to include his wife Juliette, and their nine children. Together, the Paskowitz clan lived a vagabonding bohemian existence, eschewing material possessions in favour of intangible riches like health and good cheer...all the while careening along the world's coastlines in search of the perfect wave. In Scratching the Horizon, Izzy Paskowitz looks back at his unusual upbringing, and his lifelong passion for the sport that carries his family's stamp. As the fourth-oldest child in a family of inveterate surfers, rock stars, and beach bums, he is uniquely qualified to shine a light on a childhood that has come to symbolize the surfing credo, a reckless young adulthood that nearly cost him his sanity, and a maturing sense of self and purpose that allows him to lift others on the back of his experience.As the father of a son with autism and the founder of "Surfers Healing," a foundation devoted to expanding the horizons of children with autism through surfing, Paskowitz has found a way to connect the surreal aspects of his childhood to the harsh realities of adulthood, and he shares these discoveries in this wickedly entertaining and transforming memoir.

Best-selling author Daniel Paisner makes an indelible impression with a moving and funny novel. From its dramatic and humorous opening scenes to its touching conclusion, Mourning Wood hooks readers with its eccentric characters and offbeat sense of humour. Absurdity, grief, and love give the richly drawn characters depth and familiarity. When Terence Wood, a fading Hollywood icon, stages his own death and disappears into a Maine coastal town, he leaves behind a couple of ex-wives and a son -- all of whom love and hate him. With a back story borrowed from one of his most forgettable pictures, Wood throws in with the louts and fishermen of Bar Harbour, Maine. He takes a job at an amusement park and falls for Two Stools, the overweight coffee shop matron who takes him in. Wood's life soon becomes distantly, yet intimately, entwined with an unlikely mess of a man, Axel Pimletz. Pimletz gets the chance of a lifetime, however, when a publisher reads his obituary for Terence Wood and hires him to write the star's memoirs. Desperate to make the most out of the opportunity, Pimletz takes on the trappings of Wood's life.Eventually, Pimletz's assumption of the fallen icon's persona takes him to Maine, where he hopes to track down some leads for the memoir. There, Wood's old world collides with his new one, and the resulting confusion brings ultimate clarity.

Originally published in 1999, Daniel Paisner's THE BALL: Mark McGwire's 70th Home Run Ball and the Marketing of the American Dream was hailed as "one of the great quirky masterpieces of baseball journalism" by the editors of Sportsjones.com, and named an Amazon.com "Top Ten Sports Book of the Year." THE BALL is a wistful parable about our national pastime. It chronicles the distinctly American path of Mark McGwire's record-setting seventieth home run ball—from the moment it was stitched in a Rawlings factory in Costa Rica and shipped (eventually) to St. Louis; to the moment it left the hands of Montreal rookie hurler Carl Pavano and collided with McGwire's "Big Stick" bat; to the moment it was "caught" by a researcher working on the heralded Human Genome Research Project; to the moment it was won at auction for $3.08 million dollars by a comic-book maven. Shot through with colorful characters, high drama and rich baseball history, it is must-reading for anyone interested in what drove our various marketplaces—and collective fantasies—at the end of the twentieth century. As baseball fans commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the historic home run race of 1998, they look back as well to a more innocent time in the game—a time before the taint of steroids and the reliance on sabermetrics that has transformed the way the game is played and the way it is remembered.

The world is too much with Terence Wood, a fading Hollywood icon who stages his own death and seeks to live anonymously in a Maine coastal town, while his aspiring filmmaker son, his variously unhinged ex-wives and the hack obituary writer hired to complete his "posthumous" memoir set off in search of Wood's legacy. A caustic tale of love and death and lobster roll that asks the reader to re-imagine what it means to leave a mark and to live a life that matters.