Stepping in the Write Direction

The Librarian of Saint-Malo  by Mario Escobar is the kind of story that wraps you up in a time period, its characters, and the storyline in a way that leaves readers unwilling to separate from the experience when the book is done, similar to viewing a powerful film that engulfs you completely. It is an unforgettable story about a period when the best and worst of humanity gathered on a global stage to fight a war so staggering in it’s breadth and brutality, it haunts us today. After finishing this book,   I couldn’t start another one for a week; it lived inside the core of me, and I needed time to process the experience. A friend sent me an Amazon prepublication promotion about this book in May. That is when I discovered author Mario Escobar, and fell in love with the cover art of his three other most recent historic fiction books released in the US: Auschwitz Lullaby (8/7/18), Children of the Stars (2/25/20), and Remember Me (9/15/20). As I begin the book,   I am struck ...

Leaving Breezy Street  by Brenda Myers-Powell is a colorful, instructive and compelling story about struggle, survival, and prevailing against all odds. It is a testament to the power of the human spirit, never giving up despite setbacks, doing the hard work to create the life you wish you had, and constructively channeling personal experience by giving back to the community through mentoring and advocating for others. I was struck by how much the descriptions of the author’s childhood reminded me of Terry McMillan’s first book  Mama , in terms of growing up in a vibrant, boisterous, energetic, challenging household, and despite enduring some of the worst life has to give, the journey leads to a personal renaissance that is a full circle joyful embrace of the past with the present, and a celebration of family and faith.  Author Myers-Powell notes,  “Respect. That’s how I lived my life. Needing respect, demanding respect and actually, that’s how I got into a lot of tr...

I did not expect this book,  The Tyranny of Big Tech  by Josh Hawley,  to affect me in the way it did. I expected a boring rant about censorship. I chose to read it because last year I witnessed many voices on Facebook and Twitter being silenced, YouTube accounts suddenly demonetized or deleted, social networks deplatformed, escalating as time went on, and continuing today. I’ve always taken the First Amendment for granted, always assumed our rights, in the land of the free, home of the brave, were sacrosanct. Then books under contract lost publishers, and others were not getting forums for exposure. Even now I hear about a book that sounds interesting in an interview, and learn it was published months ago with little to no fanfare. As a lifelong reader, it was frightening to witness such severe shifts in a matter of months.  Hawley’s unassuming book with its muted gray cover, is a staggering indictment of Big Tech, its rise to power, and incestuous relationship with...

It’s been a long time since I read a book with vocabulary like you find in  While Justice Sleeps  by Stacey Abrams. Words and phrases shimmer throughout the book,  a storm of verbal confetti including cacophony, eidetic, epithetic, saturnine, weft, “parsing out opprobrium,” and others, the totality of which potent enough to ratchet up one’s verbal SAT scores. If you’re fond of rich vocabulary, Abram’s lexicon lifts you up on silvery wings and carries you swiftly through the pages. The book is a winning trifecta of smart political thriller, investigation of global criminal weaponization of c hromosomal research , and judicial intrigue at the highest levels, a tale of “carpetbaggers, and Frankensteins, and lesser kings,” with a cinematic quality.  Supreme Court Justice Howard Wynn, gruff, inscrutable, imperial, curmudgeonly, and cantankerous, hates US President Brandon Stokes. His increasing paranoia about an upcoming SCOTUS vote on a Big Pharma merger ...

Adulting is hard, harder for some than for others. On the outside looking in, seeing nothing but privilege, judgement comes easy. It’s hard to fathom promise that never matches expectations, a knife felt most keenly by it’s owner. Beautiful things can be fleeting if not safeguarded. Hunter Biden’s memoir Beautiful Things is an instructive narrative on deriving strength from within the throes of human frailty.  The nexus of Hunter’s lifetime struggles, through rehabs and every other taxing issue in his life, was the unconditional love, commitment, and active involvement of his supportive brother Beau, as well as that of his busy, otherwise occupied, extended family. Living life in the public eye, for some, makes recovery an impossible tightrope to successfully navigate over the infinite horizon of time, played out live beneath the unrelenting spotlight’s glare of global scrutiny.  A failed marriage, the inability to repeatedly rise above one’s problems long enough to end them, ...

By the time I was two thirds of the way through  Everything Will Be OK  by Dana Perino  a series of questions cropped up in my head. I wondered why such a book would limit its audience by focusing specifically on women. Can a woman write such a book as this for all career oriented people, or would men just dismiss it without a second glance because it was written by a woman?  Don’t men need the same kind of advice, or are women the ones that need remedial help in foundations of leadership and career management? Why wouldn’t a businessman need or want a book on career advice written by a woman? Is theirs a skill set previously acquired naturally on athletic fields, during military service, or networking in locker rooms and strip clubs, that women just don’t get? A less than charitable thought meandered through my brain cells: men don’t need a book like Dana’s because traditionally they ride to the top on the backs of woman they manage, who make them look good while th...

On The House: A Washington Memoir by John Boehner is a real litter box of a book, as you might expect from any memoir by a House Speaker describing Washington DC politicians from 1991-2015 (a period during which Congressional earmarks doubled from  $23.2 to $47.4 billion).  It contains such nuggets as Mark Meadows ending  up on his knees in Boehner’s office (probably not the last time Meadows assumed that position in DC), a 10” knife ends up near Boehner’s neck in a tense moment on the chamber floor (to be fair, Boehner can have that affect on some politicians and voters alike), and a friend gifting Boehner, as a tribute, a unique leathery African hunting trophy in a case he displayed on the center of his conference table (which staffers repeatedly relocated, but he always restored). The unpleasantness with the knife involved strong feelings about talk of earmarks being cancelled (they were), but by way of an update, this Rep should be happier now with earmarks’ recent 20...