Mike Farris – författare

THE ALTITUDE EXPERIENCE: Successful Trekking and Climbing Above 8,000 Feet (Falcon)Mike Farris The first comprehensive guide for climbing above 8,000 feet The one-volume resource for any traveler who will be at high altitude for any period of time, this guide contains organized technical information from medical and science texts as well as anecdotes from real climbers who share their own experiences, in the body as well as the mind. This new book also lists preparation and training guidelines for ascending altitude, tips on how to acclimate, what to bring, how to "come down" after descent, and how to treat altitude sickness if it occurs. This is a practical guide for anyone new to such travel, as well as an up-to-date guide with new information for experienced climbers. Mike Farris is a biology professor at Hamline University and an experienced high-altitude climber who has traveled throughout North America, South America and the Himalayas. He lives in Northfield, Minnesota.

Descriptions and maps to all the major climbing areas in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Two hundred new routes and two new climbing areas have been added for a total of nearly 1,000 routes at 13 areas.

In 2000, CIA director George J. Tenet revealed the identities of some of those who were represented by nameless stars on the CIA’s Memorial Wall at its headquarters. Among those was a Texan named John W. Kearns. John served as a special operations officer in the so-called “secret war” in Laos, the CIA’s paramilitary operation during the Vietnam War. John, whose call sign was, fittingly, “Lone Star,” was killed in action in 1972. He was posthumously awarded the CIA’s highest honor, the Intelligence Star, “in recognition of his courageous performance under hazardous conditions.” For years, John’s story stayed pretty well unknown, shrouded in secrecy by classified government documents and mentioned only in passing in books about the “secret war.” Until now. Paul Heckmann, with the assistance of Mike Farris, tells his own personal story of adoption as a child and struggles with addiction that, later in life, led him to search for his biological family—and to discover a hero half-brother he had never known. While digging deeper into John’s story of heroism, he struggled with new and seemingly insurmountable physical difficulties of his own. Searching for Lone Star tells the story of two brothers, neither of whom knew about the other until long after the heroic death of the older that inspired the younger to overcome his own adversity. It is a story of sacrifice and inspiration, of love and loss, and, ultimately, of family.

Lies, murder, and a legendary courtroom battle threaten to tear apart the Territory of Hawaii.In September of 1931, Thalia Massie, a young naval lieutenant’s wife, claims to have been raped by five Hawaiian men in Honolulu. Following a hung jury in the rape trial, Thalia’s mother, socialite Grace Fortescue, and husband, along with two sailors, kidnap one of the accused in an attempt to coerce a confession. When they are caught after killing him and trying to dump his body in the ocean, Mrs. Fortescue’s society friends raise enough money to hire seventy-four-year-old Clarence Darrow out of retirement to defend the vigilante killers. The result is an epic courtroom battle between Darrow and the Territory of Hawaii’s top prosecutor, John C. Kelley, in a case that threatens to touch off a race war in Hawaii and results in one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in American history.Written in the style of a novel, but meticulously following the historical record, A Death in the Islands weaves a story of lies, deception, mental illness, racism, revenge, and murder—a series of events in the Territory of Hawaii that nearly tore apart the peaceful islands, reverberating from the tenements of Honolulu to the hallowed halls of Congress, and right into the Oval Office itself, and left a stain on the legacy of one of the greatest legal minds of all time.