Joseph W. Michels – författare

With his dreams in tatters, Lemuel once again searches for a new beginning.

VILLA MARCKWALD is a love story set in the immediate aftermath of the unification of East and West Germany. Alice Marckwald and Adam Bell, both fifty-eight and born in Berlin, meet under adversarial conditions arising from counter restitution claims for the return of an architecturally significant urban mansion in the heart of Berlin. Alice, a widow with two grown daughters, was born in the mansion but remembers it only as a child. The Nazis had forced her Jewish family to sell the residence in the 1930''s. Adam, whose "Aryan" family purchased the mansion, grew up there and was in his early twenties at the time the building was seized by the communist regime in the 1950''s.

Both found their way to America. Alice works as a mathematician in Santa Monica, California, and Adam is a professor of archaeology at a small college in central Pennsylvania. Both, for their own reasons, greet news of the possibility of recovering the mansion as a welcome development in their respective lives and file the necessary papers seeking its return.

The shock to each after being informed the other has filed a competing claim strengthens their resolve. Eventually, they meet face to face where their initial animosity is slowly worn away as they come to know one another. A week-long sojourn on the island of Sardinia brings their relationship to a new level and poses a dilemma that each must resolve if a satisfactory outcome is to be achieved.

POSTSTRASSE 16 tells the story of a young college graduate anxious to succeed in the fast-pace world of internet entrepreneurship who commits to a business relationship not knowing the dangers it poses. Claire Berman is a twenty-seven year old Harvard educated woman who possesses special skills in the hot new field of crowd-sourcing analysis. Working out of a dot-com incubator in Alexandria, Virginia, she’s approached by Lawrence Appleton, who identifies himself as a representative of the Clearfield Institute of New York City. The Institute’s mission, he explains, is to promote world peace through assisting governments in Eastern Europe in their fight against smuggling.

Stopping off in Berlin, Germany, after a brief business trip to Belgrade on behalf of the Institute, Claire visits her grandmother, Alice Marckwald, who lives there after gaining possession of an urban mansion in a restitution claim shortly after the unification of East and West Germany. The visit becomes open-ended as she doggedly pursues the objectives of the Institute using her crowd-sourcing expertise. Gradually, she discovers the true identity of her employer and the full extent of the danger she’s been exposed to.

The action is fast-paced, with Claire finding herself buffeted by criminal threats as she pursues her work through the capitals of Eastern Europe.

GABY tells the extraordinary story of a proud woman building a life across three continents. The adored only daughter of secular Jewish industrialists, she was born in 1936 Berlin at the height of the Nazi rise to power. Her family fled to relative poverty in British occupied Palestine. Gaby became a patriot for the nascent state of Israel, serving in the military during the 1956 Sinai campaign. But a fierce academic ambition drove her to California to pursue an education.

In America, Gaby found relative happiness as a mathematician, wife, and mother of two. She was a pioneer and talented innovator in the use of computers, and often brought that expertise into play while accompanying her widely traveled archaeologist husband. But like so many women of her time, she struggled to balance professional goals with family responsibilities. Though her talents were recognized in everything she undertook, Gaby herself never felt she fully realized her early promise and expectations.

This vivid life history traces a path through political disruption, personal ambition, painful loss, and family loyalty. It offers glimpses of the rich traditions of pre-War Germany and the Israeli pioneer spirit within a modern American life.

ASSYRIAN GOLD is the fourth action-thriller novel to feature WILLIAM CHURCH, the freelance recovery specialist previously based in San Francisco. At the urging of his principal client, a New York insurance company, he takes up temporary residence in London. There, he is contacted by a representative of an undisclosed Middle Eastern country anxious to have Church recover a horde of six hundred pieces of priceless ancient Neo-Assyrian gold jewelry looted by militants from an important archaeological site located in a region of the country outside effective government control.

Church is offered a two million dollar fee for the successful recovery of the jewelry before it can be melted down into gold bullion or before it disappears into the shadowy antiquities market of Europe. Capitalizing on leads developed through a clever use of the internets deep web, Church sets out to intercept the militants before they can dispose of the collection.

Aided by a small team of Ex-Israeli military intelligence operatives, Church engages in a race against time that takes him from the Middle East to Cyprus and finally to eastern Europe, with deadly exchanges of gunfire all along the way.

This work is an abridged version of the book CHANGING SETTLEMENT PATTERNS IN THE AKSUM-YEHA REGION OF ETHIOPIA: 700 BCAD 850 written by the author and published in 2005 in the Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology Series by British Archaeological Reports (BAR) of Oxford, United Kingdom.

Most of the books methodological and technical sections have been removed in order for the reader to more easily focus on the main theme of the work, namely how the study of the settlement history of a single region can reveal the ways in which a society adapts to changing conditions over the course of a thousand years.

From a scatter of simple hamlets and villages, Ancient Aksum evolved into a formidable mercantile state that, for a time, controlled much of the trade at the southern end of the Red Sea. Then, as circumstances changed, Aksum went into decline, its urban center contracting then disappearing. The historical trajectory of Aksum as discussed in this work offers a textbook example of political change: from egalitarian hamlets, the Aksumites organized themselves into an increasingly prominent local chiefdom, then into a kingdom, and eventually into a state.