IDKPress books are available on Amazon (all countries), Barnes & Noble and all major online sites.
In addition, for our books are currently available from The Book Depository with free shipping to most countries. To see if your country qualifies for this free shipping please click here. (The Book Depository is owned by Amazon.com.)
To see all of our books on any site, just type in the word IDKPress and all of our books will appear on the screen. This is true for all Amazons and all book-selling sites as well. Enjoy!
Books in the works!
Pet Rock
Pet Rock (a working title) will be a series of books in chronological order each spanning approximately 20 years. The first volume is scheduled for publication in mid-2023.
It is an autobiographical work of a the life of an ordinary person, John Harding, who met a slew of non-ordinary and extraordinary people including Woody Allen, billionaire Henry Taub founder of Automatic Data Processing, Nobel Prize Winners Richard Feynman and Linus Pauling, screen writers Robert Towne and Billy Wilder, Mary Bancroft who was involved in the plot to kill Hitler and linked to the shooting of President Kennedy, and boxers Jake LaMotta and Rocky Graziano and many many more!
Harding’s wives included a noblewoman from Italy with 2 Popes and 48 Cardinals in her family, a beautiful wife from Rome, Italy who turned out to be a mental genius and a photographic memory which is possessed by only about 60 people in the world and a Chinese wife, also known as The Tiger Balm Princess – born into what had been the richest family in Asia referred to as the Tiger Balm Kings.
John Harding’s descendants through his daughter, a role model for Lady Di, come from one of the wealthiest and known families on earth and John is working on a book about them which is due out shortly, entitled:
ANCESTRY OF THE GETTY AND HARDING FAMILIES
Published Works!
Escape from Paradise
John & May Harding
Escape from Paradise is a contemporary and true woman’s story set in Singapore, Brunei, Australia, England, and the United States. It involves Singapore’s famous Tiger Balm family, and a wealthy and mysterious family from Brunei and the link between them, a young Singaporean woman, May Chu Lee. This story of May Chu’s escape from her arranged marriage in Singapore to the United States, involves an American, the current British Lord Chancellor, and an ex-CIA agent with Republican Party ties to George Bush, Sr., and now a prominent Washington lobbyist for Burma.
For divorce in Singapore, May Chu needed more than a lawyer; she was forced to wage guerilla warfare against a powerful family with business interests in the United States, including an IPO of X-10 Wireless, then under registration with the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission. From its first paragraph, Escape from Paradise draws the reader into the ambiance of a cosmopolitan Asia never touched upon by any other book.
Visit the original web site for Escape from Paradise, with details on the book and tons of reviews (can’t put the book down) along with photos of the actual people in the book original website: EscapefromParadise.com!
Escape from Paradise is now in pre-production as a film to see the trailer, click here.
Escape from Paradise Reviews!
“It took me two and a half evenings to complete your un-put-downable book…it is a unique contribution to the appreciation of a life in Singapore. Thank you for having written it.” C. V. Devan Nair, former President of Singapore.
“Bought the book from Select this weekend and can’t put it down! It’s a great read! And so nostalgic for me—the good old days!” Glen Goei, writer and director of the Miramax film That’s the Way I Like It and who played the title role opposite Anthony Hopkins in the London production of M. Butterfly. Mr. Goei’s latest film is The Blue Mansion – Click for the trailer!
“It is a remarkable story and so full of intrigue that it reads at times like fiction.” Jonathan Burnham, Editor in Chief & President, Talk Miramax Books.
“It’s quite a story ” The legendary Alice Mayhew, Vice-President & Editorial Director, Simon & Schuster.
“This book out-Dallas, Dallas. No one has written so well of the other side of paradise,” Francis T. Seow, former Solicitor General of Singapore
Escape from Paradise at Amazon.
How to Open a Successful Pawnshop
Second Edition
Norman Gornbein
How to Open a Successful Pawnshop, Second Edition is written by Norman Gornbein, a former pawnbroker and master jeweler and edited by John Harding. The expanded and improved Second Edition of Norman Gornbein’s best-selling How to Open a Successful Pawnshop is thorough, clear, and, yes, even entertaining, thanks the author’s positive and engaging personality.
Hardcore Pawn’s pawnshop was set up by Norman Gornbein. He tells us, “One of the successful pawnshops that I recently opened for a client in Detroit just became super-successful—it was bought by Les Gold, and now is the site for his TV show! I am very proud of the fact that what I set up was good enough for Les Gold and his cast and crew.”
Norman Gornbein, whose extremely successful pawnshop was featured on CNN, now works as a consultant to existing pawnshops and setting up new pawnshops for a $50,000 fee and up.
How to Open a Successful Pawnshop at Amazon.
Dear Friends and Darling Romans
Mary Chamberlin
Cover & illustrations by the famous Italian artist, Nicola Simbari.
Also on Kindle. If you already purchased the book your Kindle version is free!
MARY CHAMBERLIN went to Rome for a three-month vacation, and, after three years, at the height of the Dolce Vita, wrote Dear Friends and Darling Romans. She had become—in spite of herself almost—a trenchant observer of things Italian: eating, drinking, births, cats, rented rooms, funerals, grandmothers, motorbikes, amore, especially amore. She had made friends with a complete cross-section of Italian life, including a favorite horse.
She had noted, with the penetrating gaze of the American Midwesterner, the vagaries of Latin behavior and misbehavior. But this is no flippant pennyweight book; it is a wise and subtle study of the Italians, as compared to the Americans—and vice versa. Mary Chamberlin’s Italians are not cliché-Latins, but living, breathing human beings. Her implied criticisms of certain American nervous tics have nothing to do with the dismal wail of the usual ex-patriot.
Mary Chamberlin is an expatriot, who loves and knows Rome as perhaps only an American ever can. Her book is brilliantly and unforgettably comic. The case histories of the ladies who have sworn off Latin lovers and founded a society called Italians Anonymous are sheer¬est of delights.
If you like a vigorous laugh that trails thoughts in its wake . . . if you are seriously concerned about America and its and how it earned its “place” in the world, this is your book. Even if all you want is to be amused, it’s still your book. It’s fresh and young and beautifully written, with something in it for everybody.
Piazza del Popolo in Rome by Nicola Simbari
One Italian Romance in a lifetime was enough..An enthralling, wonderfully observed work of art from fifty years ago, rich with color and emotion and packed with intriguing characters. Chamberlin is truly a master storyteller.
Dear Friends and Darling Romans is also available in Rome at The Lion Bookshop, V.d. Greci, 33-36 (06 32654007). Off Via del Corso, Between Piazza del Popolo and Piazza di Spagna.
Mary Chamberlin was born in Lebanon, Illinois, and is a graduate of Monticello College in Alton, Illinois, where she was admitted when only fifteen years old. She subsequently attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City and had a brief theatrical career (including an MGM contract), terminated by marriage and motherhood. She moved to Rome, Italy in 1954, where she lived ever since. She is the author of one other book, The Palazzo, and has written for television, magazines, films, and newspapers.
Dear Friends and Darling Romans at Amazon.
The script for Mary Chamberlin’s award-wining teleplay, The Ascent of P. J. O’Hara, is preserved in the archives of the Steven H. Scheuer Collection at Yale University.
The Palazzo
Mary Chamberlin
Now, available in Kindle and Paperback! Free Kindle if you purchase Paperback. After buying Paperback, go for the free Kindle!
Now available at Barnes & Noble in both NOOK, and Paperback formats. Click!
The original deluxe edition of The Palazzo was published by Lippincott. This delightful book is written in a bracing, astringent style that is part spumoni and part spice, the author writes of the eternal delights of the Eternal City about Americans in Rome doing as Americans do, and Romans doing as Romans have done for centuries.
The Palazzo presents a fascinating picture of Rome in the period that followed the time of The Talented Mr. Ripley and La Dolce Vita..
The Palazzo, written in a bracing, astringent style, is a novel the about the Eternal City’s eternal delights where Americans do in Rome as Americans do, and Romans do as Romans have done for centuries.
The Palazzo is beautifully-written, insightful, witty, and enjoyable. It involves the inhabitants of the Palazzo Salvini, once the proud Renaissance palace of a cardinal, Palazzo Salvini which the Marchesa Luisa Salvini has converted into separate rental apartments.
The owners and tenants are caught up in the complications of this light-hearted, sophisticated comedy of international fun and games-either remembering or looking forward to better days. There’s Caroline Salvini, a beautiful American the perfect wife to dashing Lorenzo-until she suspects he’s having an affair; there’s Caroline’s mother-in-law, the Marchesa, hoping to avert a marital crisis for her son; and there’s Randy, an American boy who keeps finding things in his apartment-a girl in his bed, his freaked-out, nomad friends showing X–rated home movies and marijuana fumes.
Written in the times of Mr. Ripley, and La Dolce Vita, this book is as contemporary now as it was then. Great lines such as: “Mrs. Aiken belonged to the sisterhood of women who have chosen to separate themselves from the world by desks,” and “The whole of the barbarous American colony was of a piece, linked by the terrible chains of democracy they dragged around the world.” Great stuff!
The Book Reader’s review: Another time, another sensibility, another world… It captures the beat and the pace of Italian life in the 1950s. Wittily written, it provides us with the crowded humanity that has always been Rome that eternal city filled with volatile lives densely packed into an endless humor.”
Another time, another sensibility, another world. This novel was originally published in 1971 at a time when memories of the Second World War and its aftermath were still fresh. The Palazzo deserves to be re-published—it’s original, extraordinarily well-written, and it captures the beat and the pace of Italian life in the 1950s.
The Palazzo at Amazon.
McKendree Hypes Chamberlin
Clifford D. Chamberlin
This is the true story of a great man from a small town, the biography of McKendree Hypes Chamberlin, written by his son, Professor Clifford D. Chamberlin in 1914, but pertinent and alive today.
McKendree Hypes Chamberlin was born in the small town of Lebanon, Illinois in 1838, the son of a Methodist preacher—an old fashioned circuit rider.
His father, Rev. David C. Chamberlin, built, with his own hands, the Lebanon Seminary with the help of the 200 some inhabitants of Lebanon, Illinois. The seminary opened with 72 students in 1828. The Lebanon Seminary was a success and was re-named McKendree College in honor of William McKendree, the first Methodist bishop born in the United States.
McKendree Hypes Chamberlin’s lifelong dream was to see that McKendree College, the small college in his home town, was properly endowed.
To fulfill his dream, Chamberlin embarked on a varied and colorful career. After his graduation from McKendree College, and a Masters Degree from Harvard, where he met fellow student, Andrew Carnegie, McKendree Hypes Chamberlin became a lawyer in Kansas City, and then an innovative financial adviser to the nation’s growing railroads, becoming Secretary of the Illinois Railway Commission.
McKendree Hypes Chamberlin subsequently developed mines in the far west, once fleeing from the Apache Indians in Black Hills, and finally returning to Lebanon where he became President of McKendree College, saving it from foreclosure and the sheriff’s hammer.
McKendree College has now become McKendree University, the oldest such institution in the State of Illinois. It still operates under the provisions of a charter obtained in 1839, with the help of a young lawyer, Abraham Lincoln.
McKendree Hypes Chamberlin at Amazon.
John
John Korffy Arnet
(aka John Ratner)
John is a fantastic, yet very plausible novel—not easy to do. John leads you through a life that begins on a garbage dump in India and winds up in an entirely different place and life-style.
The book is really two books in one that, in addition to the novel, it includes a long and extremely valuable section on naturopathy, homeopathy and other alternate systems of health and cures. The author is licensed in naturopathy.
This book is well worth it both for its fascinating story and its cures. You will be lucky to have it.
John, either in paperback or in Kindle will be a great addition to your library—and health.
The cover is done by the author—famous and extremely successful painter. Originally, from California, the author has lived for many years is in Italy, where he is known as Il Maestro for his paintings along with his famous Michelangelo-style church frescoes..
John Korffy Arnet at Amazon
John Ratner
Maria Laura Perilli
Italian: È alla pittura dell’artista americano John Ratner che è dedicato questo testo, per sottolinearne le attenzioni iconografiche, ad alta identificabilità, verso il mondo animale e vegetale. Monumentali scritte latine, in gran parte estrapolate dal De Rerum Natura di Lucrezio, ne accompagnano la proposta artistica che affronta la questione ambientale con scientificità e originalità, alla luce di un approccio fortemente ecoantropologico.
English translation: It is to the painting of the American artist John Ratner that this text is dedicated, to underline its iconographic attentions, highly identifiable, towards the animal and vegetable world. Monumental Latin, writings, largely extrapolated from De Rerum Natura by Lucretius, accompany, this beautifully artistic proposal that addresses the environmental issue with scientificity and originality, in the light of a strongly eco-anthropological approach.
Available at:
&
Amazon, France
Barack Obama The Psychological Analysis of the Man behind the Dream
[Kindle Edition]
John Harding
The enigma of Obama partially explained as who was he and from where did he come?
In order to construct a psychological analysis of Barack Obama II, it is important to consider the major events in his life—especially during his early years.
This is not an easy task as there is much conflicting evidence regarding the life of Obama fostering many “conspiracy” theories regarding Obama, the most notable example being his place of birth.
Conspiracy theories, however, have little or no bearing on the psychological analysis of Obama. Obviously, Obama and his parents, especially his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, have led unusual and unconventional lives. This fact alone may explain some of the conflicting views, facts, and opinions regarding Obama.
This report, therefore, does not dwell on any conspiratorial speculations, questions, or doubts about Obama’s origins, college transcripts, or early friendships—all matters which have been beyond the resolution of any other parties heretofore.
These considerations are anecdotal and, even if having a basis in reality, are irrelevant to the psychological analysis of Obama.
This analysis is based on the wealth of known facts concerning Obama’s life and surroundings.
Barack Obama The Psychological Analysis of the Man behind the Dream [Kindle Edition] at Amazon.
IDKPress Genealogical Series
Genealogy of the Rounds and Pfeffer Families
Going Back 1,200+ Years!
by John Harding
Virginia Pfeffer Anderson and, the author, John Harding are from the small town of Lebanon, Illinois, the site of McKendree University, founded by their 2nd Great Grandfather, Rev. David C. Chamberlin who began his career as a Methodist circuit rider, a preacher on a horse with a bottle of sherry in his saddlebag, which earned him the moniker of the “Wild Yankee.”
In Virginia and John’s genealogy are two United States Presidents and the founders of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and McKendree University, the oldest tertiary institution in the state of Illinois. Abraham Lincoln helped their 2nd great grand-uncle, the President of McKendree to write a new charter for McKendree College.
It is striking that this genealogy goes all the way back through Virginia and John’s maternal lineage to England and astoundingly to Duke Bernard Nase Narbonne, born 795 AD in Jutland, Denmark. He was the father of Gorm “Enske” Fróðason, King of Sjaelland born in 820 AD and died in 890 AD. In modern terminology he is known as King of Sjaelland, Denmark Gorm Enske, Sjaelland being the large island of Zealand the largest part of today’s Denmark and is home to the Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen.
Very few, if any, American genealogies go this far back in time.
The known genealogy of the Rounds family of Virginia’s first husband does not go back that far, but the Rounds are an interesting and entrepreneurial family who developed the Breckenridge Ski Resort.
The book is available on all Amazon and most other on-line sites.
IDKPress Classic Series
The Mysterious Stranger
Mark Twain
Mark Twain’s secret of the Universe. A masterpiece! It is widely considered to be one of the top 100 greatest books of all time. The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain’s last work, was begun in 1897 and revised first in 1902 and then in 1908, the third version was the only manuscript actually titled The Mysterious Stranger.
This is a tour-de-force of Mark Twain’s literary stile and mastery of plot, believed by some to be his best work, goes from a light-hearted beginning, into a fantasy world on its way to an unexpected and shocking ending consistent with the recent theories of the universe.
The Mysterious Stranger is a brilliant work going beyond science fiction into the unknown.
Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910). Mark Twain was an American author and humorist. However, beyond that, he was fascinated with science, scientific inquiry, and an early adopter of science fiction.
Mark Twain’s book, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, features a time traveler from contemporary America, using his knowledge of science to introduce modern technology to Arthurian England. This type of story-line would later become a common feature of science fiction.
The Mysterious Stranger at Amazon.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carrol
This new edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is set in large type which is great for children—and for some of the older generation, as well.
The book is fully illustrated with the famous illustrations from the original edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (commonly shortened to Alice in Wonderland) is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.
The book tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world (the Wonderland of the title) populated by peculiar and interesting creatures. This edition with all the classic illustrations is in large type, 16 point Adobe Garamond Pro (which is larger than what you are looking at now) for easy reading.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at Amazon.
Dracula
Bram Stoker
He is guarded by three very voluptuous young women with sharp white teeth and a taste for blood. Soon thereafter, the solicitor’s fiancée, Mina, visits a friend on the English coast. The town is full of speculation over a Russian ship run aground nearby, its crew missing, the dead body of its captain, crucifix in hand, lashed to the wheel. A giant dog was seen leaping from the deck before disappearing into the countryside. The ship’s cargo: fifty boxes of Transylvanian dirt. As the beautiful Mina will soon learn, Count Dracula has arrived! In the moonlight opposite me were three young women . . . I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips.