Based in Singapore in the 1990s, Jerry wrote Hewlett-Packard manuals and online help translated into 19 languages and “bought” by millions. At the same time he created the course “The Movie Industry and the Media” as lecturer at National University of Singapore, and made dozens of trips throughout the region, especially in Indonesia and China. Tutored by the shocks and hidden traps of working in cultures not one's own, where honesty and ambition lead straight to danger, Jerry became the authority on “Working and Living in Southeast Asia,” published in Interlude; on “Global Independent Contracting,” in The Independent Perspective; and on “Basing Yourself Overseas,” his chapter in the web-published book, Getting Started in Consulting and Independent Contracting.
Whether in Baltimore or Southeast Asia — on drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico or at the ivory tower university — with machine operators or tenured professors — at the supposedly fabulous horizons of global business or within the confines of the state penitentiary — Jerry has moved freely among those with the need, and the courage, to know. To many, however, Jerry is best known for his “user's guide” Nuclear War Manual for Dogs, in which a straight-talking “streetwise canine” lets us in on certain “practical difficulties” of trying to survive after a nuclear explosion... and the consequent inadvisability of letting such explosions take place! Jerry has trained operators and engineers from such industrial facilities as an electricity monitoring station in Shanxi, China; a gas pipeline in India; an airport security system in Saudi Arabia; a Bristol-Myers plant in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico; an acrylic acid plant in Houston; a chicken packaging plant in Tennessee; a U.S. Steel mill in Chicago; an Exxon refinery in Baton Rouge; and all of the 22 major FAA air traffic control centers. In the U.S. he has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Goucher College in Baltimore. His courses have included fiction writing, drama, Shakespeare, “Comparative Renaissances: Elizabethans vs. the Beatles” and “Writing Online Documentation.” And he has written user manuals for Texas Instruments' process-control systems and Becton Dickinson's microbiology and immunochemistry devices. He has degrees from Harvard and UC Berkeley, where he won the Shrout Short Story Prize, and the Elizabeth Mills Crothers Prize for fiction, and has worked with screenwriters and screenwriting gurus James Dalessandro, Lew Hunter and, since 2003, Syd Field. He lives in San Francisco with his Singaporean wife, lapsed microbiologist Grace Wong Kurtz. Trivia In Baltimore Jerry helped develop, co-ordinate and supervise daily educational services for struggling high school students and drop-outs; counseled families and youth; and organized central-city neighborhoods, both poor and working-class, black and white. At TI, he wrote his division's largest proposal to date, a successful offer to ARAMCO for a $100 million oil production monitoring and control system in the Central Dispatch Center in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Jerry wrote the user's guide for Roadnet Systems' truck routing and scheduling system. UPS bought first the product and then the company — the backbone of their computerized deliveries. Jerry has published dozens of articles and reviews, and a few stories in obscure publications. He is also known for the course “How to Participate in Your Own Life.”

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