Biography
Best selling author/journalist Bob Reiss has always been fascinated by the border between order and anarchy, the moment when peace becomes chaos, order becomes danger and events once considered impossible suddenly turn real.
His journalism has brought him to research and military bases in the Arctic and Antarctica, where he's covered climate change and potential conflict in polar regions, to Sudan, Somalia and South Africa, where he wrote about drought, rebellion and civil unrest, and to the Amazon rainforest where his dispatches about murder and environmental destruction made him a national magazine award finalist. Author Bill McKibben called Bob's non-fiction book on earth's warming, The Coming Storm, Extreme Weather And Our Terrifying Future, "The most readable and intelligent summary of global warming science and politics I have read."
Bob has advised European politicians on US Arctic policy. He's moderated National Academy of Sciences meetings on disease outbreaks in polar regions. He's accompanied Coast Guard missions on a polar icebreaker and against drug runners off Central America. His work has been included in collections; The Best of the Washington Post Magazine and The Best of Outside Magazine. In 2019 he was the recipient of a Redford Center grant as co-producer of a documentary film project on the importance of the Bering Strait as the Arctic opens up. In 2018 he won a best reporting New York Press Club award for his coverage of the state and fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge under the Trump White House in Fortune Magazine.
Bob's 18 novels reflect the same fascination with order versus anarchy, and always the question, what if? What if, during the cold war, there had been a mock US town in the Soviet Union, in which Russian orphans were trained in espionage? (The Last Spy) What if oil suddenly becomes unusable due to a microbe and the world goes cold turkey on fossil fuel? Planes fall from the sky. Cars stop. Food delivery stops. Society and government crashes. (Black Monday) What if a new drug heightened human intuition to an unimaginable degree? (The Side Effect) What if the deadly 1918 pandemic re-appears due to melting Arctic tundra and ice? (White Plague, written under the name of James Abel) Or what if AI suddenly, without humans being aware of it, achieved full consciousness and the ability to make choices. What would it do first? (The Impossible Detective, coming 2026)
Bob's fiction has been called "sparkling and fast paced." (Washington Post) "Dead On!" (People Magazine) "First Rate!" (Rocky Mountain News) "Gripping...Riveting" (Publishers Weekly. "Splendid. Great writing. Great suspense. Great action." (Los Angeles Times). He's appeared on TV shows including Morning Joe, Nightwatch, Nightline, CNN, Dan Rather Reports, Charlie Rose, Good Morning America and Al Jazeera, discussing his work.
Bob believes that good storytelling is what drives both fiction and non-fiction, and has taught writing at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College, the University of North Carolina's MFA program, and at Montclair State University. He advises corporate and NGO audiences on the art of story telling and how it can advance what they want to do.
Bob grew up in Queens, New York, and graduated from Northwestern University with a Bachelors degree in Journalism, and from the University of Oregon with an MFA. He says he knew he wanted to be a writer since age 13, when he finished his first novel. “It stank.” Over the next 13 years he papered his bedroom walls with rejection slips from publishers and magazines. His first successful novel, Summer Fires, was published by Simon & Schuster, in 1980. Called a "smashing first novel" by the New York Times, it was about the discovery of a gigantic oil field under the South Bronx.
Bob's journalistic experience began at the age of 19, when he was a copy boy for the Chicago Tribune. "I stole a press pass, made a copy, and put a photo of myself on it. The next summer I got a job in Europe, hitchhiked to Northern Ireland and told the occupying British Troops that I was the Chicago Tribune reporter. I'm not sure why they believed me."
Bob ended up interviewing the British commander, staying with a Bogside family, going out with commandos, being gassed in riots and getting a ride out of Londonderry from an IRA official. The article he wrote, and which ran in the Daily Northwestern, "stupidly ignored my personal experiences, but like perverse journalists everywhere I was hooked on the lifestyle. I'd always loved telling stories, and now I learned I loved travel too. I tried to figure out a way I could combine both for the rest of my life."
Bob sold his first articles to The Chicago Tribune - a four part investigative series on abandoned housing - when he was a senior at Northwestern.
Bob says, "This will probably sound corny but if you can't be corny on your own website, where can you do it? I believe you should leave the world better than you found it, and I hope my travels and writing will draw attention to the similarities rather than the differences between people around the world. I hope my work will make readers think about issues and choices they face in everyday life. The more we can put ourselves in the shoes of others, the fewer mistakes we make as a nation, as a people, and as individuals."
Bob is also author of a five novel series about Conrad Voort, the wealthiest detective in New York City, written under the name of Ethan Black.
Bob divides his time between New York City and western Massachusetts. He lives with four time Emmy award winning TV producer, and heart winning ninja warrior Wendy Roth.