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Open Books Fiction
The Virtual Life of Fizzy Oceans by David A. Ross
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Simple Intent by Linda Sands
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A Week with Fiona Wonder by Kelly Huddleston
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Good Morning Corfu by David A. Ross
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Featured Fiction Titles
Two brothers. One mother. One  big question.

Phillip, along with his brother Spencer, has grown up believing that they were Jewish-American. After their mother's death, the brothers decide to take DNA tests, and the surprising results send them on a genetic treasure hunt in search of who they really are—and what that might mean. Are they purely products of their genetics; or were they formed more completely by their social interactions and upbringing? And who, exactly, is Mr. Wizard?

"The writing is knowing and engaging, wise about its cultural orientations, and driven to discoveries both reassuring and life-enhancing." —Michael Curtis, Fiction Editor Emeritus, The Atlantic

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Winter in Chicago
​by David M. Hamlin
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Copper Sky by Milana Marsenich
The Irrationalist by Andrew Pessin
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Tales from The Warming by Lorin R. Robinson
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Winter Gets Hot
​by David M. Hamlin
ISBN13: 978-0692208342
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Historical Fiction
The Singing Bones
by Stephen Spotte

The Singing Bones recounts the life and times of eighteenth century polymath and explorer Georg Wilhelm Steller, the first European naturalist to visit Alaska. 

​A blend of narrative adventure and biography, this historical first-person novel chronicles the professional visions and conflicted life of a deeply fascinating, flawed, and courageous man who devoted everything to advancing the frontiers of science and improving the lives of the native Siberians.
Copper Sky
by Milana Marsenich

Set in the Copper Camp of Butte, Montana in 1917, Copper Sky tells the story of two women with opposite lives. Kaly Shane, mired in prostitution, struggles to find a safe home for her unborn child, while Marika Lailich, a Slavic immigrant, dodges a pre-arranged marriage to become a doctor. As their paths cross, and they become unlikely friends, neither knows the family secret that ties them together.
The Irrationalist
by Andrew Pessin

The sad life and tragic murder of René Descartes, the world’s most famous philosopher.

Who would want to murder the world’s most famous philosopher? Turns out: nearly everyone.

In 1649, Descartes was invited by the Queen of Sweden to become her Court Philosopher. Though he was the world’s leading philosopher, his life had by this point fallen apart. He was 53, penniless, living in exile in Amsterdam, alone. With much trepidation but not much choice, he arrived in Stockholm in mid-October. Shortly thereafter he was dead.
The Ballet Lover by Barbara L. Baer exposes the beauty and cruelty of the ballet world.

As the orchestra plays the first ominous note of Swan Lake, Geneva, an American journalist and ballet lover, waits for the heart-stopping beauty and seduction of the romantic duet to start, but instead she witnesses Rudolf Nureyev failing to catch his Russian partner Natalia Makarova. The Ballet Lover is a refined, mesmerizing, fictional account of two of the most celebrated dancers in the dance world, how one compromised the other, and how the drama on the stage often mirrors those played out in real life.
Witchy Illusions
by Stephen Spotte

She's a comely, kick-ass witch who won't be put to the stake easily!

Witchy Illusions recounts the trial of Mademoiselle Ambrosine, a girl of fifteen accused of witchcraft in France in autumn 1515. During Mademoiselle Ambrosine's trial, justice plays out erratically, and nothing is ever clear. The proceeding turns increasingly opaque and the issues become more convoluted and muddled by legal precedent. Arguments about God’s will, mankind’s place in nature, and whether demons defecate and have erections obscure focus on the central issue of the defendant's practice of witchcraft. These and similar metaphysical issues puzzle and invigorate everyone, the court and spectators alike, and it becomes evident that Institoris might have met his match in Mademoiselle Ambrosine.  
Rosemary in Bloom
by Khristy Reibel

What if war separated you from your true love? What if you married the wrong man? What if the power of love brought you together again?

Inspired by a true story, Rosemary in Bloom explores faith, forgiveness, enduring love against all odds, and the difficult decisions that strong, smart women on the home front had to make during World War II.
Mysteries & Thrillers
Simple Intent
by Linda Sands

When two legal interns uncover the case of a drug dealer wrongly convicted of murder, their simple intent is to free an innocent man and bring the guilty to justice, however their effort is complicated by a crooked cop, a mobster, his ambitious attorney and a secret alliance.
Whine & Cheese Cozy Mystery Series: Judy Volhart
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There’s something cheesy going on around here…

Thirty-year-old Amalia Kis just opened a new bistro that specializes in selling mouth-watering platters of cheeses, salamis, artisan breads and wines with quirky names like Broke Ass, Well Hung and The Accomplice.  

But when she’s greeted by the body of the local town hoarder hanging from the coat hooks at her bistro, she finds herself in the midst of an unsavory murder investigation, and her plans for success are quickly thwarted. 
​Only Billionaires Can Play is frighteningly plausible, and readers will find both its premise and its conclusion highly unsettling as they come to realize that they can never again be certain of anything.
​The Doubly Dead Angel-Thief
by Marc Whelchel

V.C. Almond’s life is in the gutter. Divorced and broke, he’s living in a rat trap apartment above the loudest punk music venue in the Delmar Loop. Worse, his dear friend, merry prankster Jake Kennedy, son of crime boss “Big Jamie” Kennedy, has just committed suicide, and stumbling upon the body of a man who’s supposed to already be dead is just the first leg of V.C.’s journey down the rabbit hole. 
Before dawn in January, 1975, Emily Winter detours from her normal route to work in the newsroom of Chicago’s top pop rock station to investigate a crime scene. The police believe the body on the street is a suicide, but Emily is stunned to discover that the dead woman is a dear friend since high school and begins an investigation that leads to a perplexing mystery – suicide or murder?
Determined to overcome the sexism that infuses her career, Emily negotiates her way into hard news coverage,. Will her investigative diligence uncover the murderer and bring justice for those who entrust their stories to her? Find out in this eagerly anticipated sequel to Winter in Chicago!
Big things often have small beginnings.

As National Security Adviser to the President of the United States, Jane Stewart shepherds an act through congress to subsidize manufacturing of silicon chips on American soil.

Argon Zhi, an executive at one of the world’s best semiconductor foundries, accepts the responsibility to craft a plan for ensuring the competitiveness of Taiwan's technology companies and ensure the continued independence of his country.

Cedric Dyson's job as a Failure Analysis engineer is to figure out why some chips do not work the way they are supposed to. When he notices a pattern among the failing chips sent to his FA lab, he uncovers a shocking truth.

Jane, Argon and Cedric, each operating within their professional domains, make a series of decisions that lead to an international blame game which could escalate into an open conflict between the world’s powers. 
Literary & Contemporary Novels
Beneath the Same Heaven
by Anne Marie Ruff

A story of love and terrorism...

Beneath the Same Heaven is a love story of an American woman and a Pakistani-born Muslim man, who seem to have bridged the divide between Western and Islamic world views. But when the husband’s father is killed by a US drone attack near the Afghan border, their cross-cultural family descends into conflicting ideas of loyalty, justice, identity, revenge, and terrorism. With candor, beauty, and unusual insight, their story reveals both how decent people can justify horrific acts, and the emotional power required to heal.
Don't Let Me Die In Disneyland
by J.A. Marzan

Brought to New York from Puerto Rico when he was seven, Eddie Loperena grew up dreaming of returning to his island paradise. But as he approaches forty, the loss of his wife and his business partner have landed Eddie squarely at a crossroads when he gets a call from his estranged boyhood friend Carlos, now a well-known drug dealer. Carlos asks Eddie to hold two suitcases full of “valuable papers.” After Eddie picks up the suitcases, Carlos disappears. During a run for political office, Eddie’s secret connection to Carlos is exposed and he is accused of absconding with Carlos’ drug money. In self-exile, Eddie writes a satire of the island that cast him adrift, and of his minority membership in “the country I was offered.” Writing from a place he calls Nowhere, Eddie implores: Don’t Let Me Die In Disneyland!


Glassman
by Steve Oskie

Mark Glassman does a surprisingly good job of feigning confidence, fooling nearly everyone but himself.

When Mark Glassman falls in love with Teresa Devlin, he realizes that he is terrified of her sexually, and that his only recourse is to resume his pursuit of Sarah Sloane, one of his housemates and soon he arrives at the neat psychological ploy of playing the two women against one another.






Swift Dam
by Sid Gustafson

Rain fell upon the deep winter snow the day before the Flood of '64. Waters rose, the rivers raged. The dam failed to hold the Birch Creek flow, and broke, giving way to a wall of water and drowning the Indians. 

​Veterinarian Alphonse Vallerone goes back 50 years to the day after the Flood, when he assisted the surviving Indians. Riding from one devastated ranch to another, he  tries to mend the grief wrought by the Flood. 

Swift Dam celebrates the native land and the Natives who survive as they have survived throughout time, perilously. 



The novels of Thomas Garlinghouse
Stephen Spotte’s bittersweet novel Wiseguys in Paradise opens at the start of the 1960s. An unnamed drifter from southern Appalachia just out of the Army takes a job as dishwasher at an Italian restaurant in Coney Island famous as a gathering place for New York mobsters. The patrons and staff befriend him, and he falls in love with a divorced woman with a young daughter. Wary of commitment, he abandons them and hitch-hikes to Key West. From there the story segues between locations as the narrator finds himself immersed in an unlikely community of love and friendship whose members include Mafia wiseguys, other drifters, a Jesuit priest/marine biologist, immigrants, gays, and lesbians. Spotte's regional dialects crackle with authenticity. 



A Week with Fiona Wonder by Kelly Huddleston

It is exactly one week until sixteen-year-old Mercy Swimmer is to spend an entire week with movie star Fiona Wonder, the prize awarded to the winner of a contest staged by a teen magazine. Mercy is kind and compassionate and always tries to see the best in everybody, even when those around her do not respond similarly. For example, her mother’s snippy, hot-tempered friend Nikki is a kleptomaniac who constantly belittles her boyfriend. Her best friend Valerie has anger issues and a weight problem. Beautiful but cold Lady Redding, Valerie’s mother, feels entitled to everything even as others go without. And Mercy’s mother, a severe asthmatic who works two menial jobs in a “dead mall”, seems to care more about Fiona Wonder and Mercy’s upcoming week with her than the pressing issues in their lives. Everything is on track for Mercy’s upcoming week with Fiona Wonder, but when her mother’s asthma flairs up, Mercy’s world turns upside down and she is faced with a decision that will ultimately challenge her own capacity for compassion. A Week with Fiona Wonder shines an intense light upon the dire consequences of social exclusivity and suggests the alternatives of inclusion, empathy and, indeed, mercy.




Made to Break Your Heart
by Richard Fellinger

A smart, sexy, and funny novel about bad breaks, bad decisions, and the long road of life.

Made to Break Your Heart is a family saga, set in a gossipy suburb, that explores the complexities of raising a child, holding a marriage together, and maintaining sanity in the cutthroat world of Little League baseball.

Nick Marhoffer is a stressed-out dad who finds himself flirting with thoughts of infidelity. While his job is being threatened by a crumbling economy, he’s fraught with anxiety over his only son’s well-being. So when his son starts playing baseball, Nick becomes a rabid Little League dad who loses sight of what’s good in his life. After developing a crush on a gorgeous team mom, he can’t decide between her and his wife, then finds himself at risk of losing everything that’s most important to him.


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The Chameleon Shuffle
by Jere Krakoff

Is he liberal? Or is he conservative? The highest judge in the land can't make up his mind.

Leonard Zweig is the accidental result of a tryst between High Court Justice Franz Babel and trapeze artist Isabella Trotsky. After languishing in The Depository for Foundlings and other Discarded Children, he is adopted by Milton and Miriam Zweig. The Zweigs are ideological opposites. Milton, who practices law in a large firm that caters to the needs of corporate clients, is a devout follower of Conservative legal thought. In contrast, Miriam is a pious Liberal lawyer at a small operation that represents people living on the margins.

This satirical novel hilariously exposes our current political climate, judicial system, and leaders.


Under the guise of mentor and muse, a frustrated writer and her ambitious teenage protégé take an illicit summer road trip fraught with racial and sexual tension. This is a compelling psychological novel about social norms, artistic ambition, and obsession.

Conceived loosely on the untimely dismissal and subsequent life of Pete Best, the so-called 'fifth Beatle', V.J. Asunder's perspective and his ultimate commitment to retribution differs markedly from Ringo Starr's predecessor. Intelligent and intense, I Shot Bruce chronicles and dramatizes obsession to the point of self-destruction.
The Bones of a Season
by Paul Breen

Fergus Sharkey has come from Ireland to London and settled in the historic surroundings of Greenwich, fabled home and birthplace of time. There the Irish immigrant falls in love with a northern English rose named Katy Prunty and soon begins to follow the fortunes of the local football team, Charlton Athletic. 


The novels of Jeff Wallach
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Satire
The story of Satan's many struggles, across the history of Human existence, to unshackle the Human mind, and open the gates to forbidden knowledge.

From the moment of his first emergence as a single spark in the dimness of prehistory, to the more enlightening force into which he evolves across the full span of human existence, Satan, as he now clearly illustrates, has been urging human beings to open their eyes to the world around them, and to continue seeking, with unfettered minds, for ultimate answers, yet to be found. To do so he must struggle against the persistent attempts to stifle that urge by the "spoon feeders," as he calls them, individuals who have insisted, within every age, and often with a bloody fist, that they, and they alone, are the possessors of the only beliefs that every human being should accept and live by, without question. As Satan traces the history of their many attempts to stop human beings from thinking for themselves, he also takes his readers on a search for the ultimate source of all evil in this world. Readers will obviously enter the book with the standard concept of Satan as a supernatural figure of evil, however they will leave the book with a better understanding of how such mind-twisting concepts have been used to keep people away from the "forbidden" knowledge that lies beyond the borders of entrenched beliefs. 
To Hell with high school!

The American education system is turned inside out when a frustrated teacher incites his students to stage an uprising.

In a poor suburban community in southern Ohio, Dieter Vogel is a failing English teacher at a high school populated predominately by minority students. He is bullied by the basketball coach, neglected by the principal, ignored by his crush, Esther, and pressured to workout with Jose, the art teacher. At the end of the first day back after summer break, Dieter is visited by Satan, who takes the initial form of a Twinkie. Satan convinces Dieter to overthrow the school mascot, Gretel the Pretzel, so that the Devil can take its place. Dieter is promised Esther’s love and the position of principal in return. All Dieter has to do is follow the Devil’s advice and use classic literature to manipulate the students into a racially charged frenzy against the mostly white staff.
Fantasy & Science Fiction
The Sci. Fi. novels of Dr. Bruce Forciea
Dr. Alex Winter, a brilliant biomedical engineer, teams with Dr. Xiu Ling, a beautiful Chinese scientist, to discover a revolutionary cure for cancer. But Tando Pharmaceuticals, the world’s largest and richest drug producer, also has an interest in the cure, and when they discover that the treatment is flawed as recipients begin to die after four months, causing a media frenzy and a drop in Tando's stock, they call upon their 'Mercenary Soldiers of Medicine' to maintain global domination.
​A brilliant artificial intelligence (AI) scientist, Dr. Alan Boyd, develops a new program that integrates part of his brain with a computer’s operating system. The program, Alan 2, can anticipate a user’s needs and automatically perform many tasks. 

A software company, International Microsystems (IM) desperately wants the program and tempts Dr. Boyd with money, but when Dr. Boyd refuses their offer, IM sabotages his job, leaving him in a difficult financial situation. 

Dr. Boyd turns to Alan 2 for an answer to his financial problems, and Alan 2 develops plan Alpha, which is a cyber robin hood scheme to rob from rich corporations via a credit card scam. 

But when Alan 2 discovers the FBI is on to them and advises Alan and Kaitlin to change locations, a dramatic worldwide chase ensues taking them to St. Thomas, a cruise ship bound for Spain, and finally to Morocco.  


The Autobiography of Satan by William A. Glasser
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When a Marine fireteam searches an isolated Vietnamese village believed to be a supply depot for the Viet Cong an IED explodes, leaving only one survivor of the five-man unit. But who is he: Bunny, Hillbilly, Poke, Injun, or "the LT"? Because he is horribly burned, disfigured, and unable to speak, the military doctors don't know, but the people back home in a coal mining camp in southern West Virginia think they know. Most unsettling of all the survivor himself isn't certain who he is.

Spanning the landscape from Vietnam's warn-torn jungles to hardscrabble Appalachia, In An Empty Room is a gripping examination of time, memory, consciousness, and selfhood and suggests unanticipated conclusions about the nature of human identity.
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A Conveersation with a Cat
Stephen Spotte

Stephen Spotte's imaginative novel, A Conversation with a Cat, recounts the tales of a scroungy former alley cat named Jinx, whose memories aren't just his own but those of other cats who existed before him, one of which was Annipe, Cleopatra's pampered pet. Through Annipe's eyes the ancient Mediterranean world of Cleopatra and her legendary lovers, Caesar and Antony, is spread before us in all its glory, pathos, and absurdity. Jinx reveals these stories telepathically one night to his stoned and inebriated owner just home after gall bladder surgery. Annipe's memories are bookended by Jinx's own that detail his early scavenging days in bleak urban alleys. 
Memoir
Heartbeats is the light-hearted memoirs of one of the pioneers in modern cardiac surgery, Constantine "Dino" Tatooles, M.D. Dino's stories, as told to his brother James E. Tatooles, will quite literally "warm your heart" as well as provide a background to the advances in cardiac surgery made over the past fifty years. 

After Medical School, Dr. Tatooles interned at the University of Chicago and received a grant from the Heart Association to open his own medical laboratory. Later, the National Heart Institute selected Dr. Tatooles as one of five doctors to study at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

"That's where we started to perfect a lot of the new operative procedures that are used today," recounts Dr. Tatooles.

Ironically, Dr. Tatooles recently had some difficult medicine of his own to swallow when he discovered that he needed a quintuple bypass. As his brother James E. Tatooles relates in Heartbeats, a procedure that Dino helped to develop eventually saved his life.
A mother, her son, and mania.

In this fictionalized memoir, a mother recounts the emotional journey she and her son take when he becomes mentally ill.

Jack is known as the Sun King because as a child he resembled the illustrated boy in his mother's deck of tarot cards. Already on the verge of madness, Jack leaves for college in Ohio but secretly decides not to take his medicine. When Jack becomes manic, his mother must retrieve him from a psychiatric hospital and bring him home to Oklahoma. She and Jack spend the next year dealing with court hearings, doctor appointments, and counseling sessions precipitated by his bipolar disorder and resultant psychosis.

Guiding Jack back to sanity leads his mother to a fateful decision—one that brings about her own emotional unraveling. 

In the end, it is the Sun King who must save his mother.
Good Morning Corfu chronicles the experiences and observations of an American expatriate living on this Mediterranean outpost of dizzying extremes. From wide-eyed wonder to cultural and personal confusion, from unbridled joy to deep despair, and from empathy to outright loathing, these short essays examine both local and expatriate lifestyles through the lens of one deeply immersed yet forever removed, fundamentally involved yet perpetually on the perimeter of a most curious culture. Even more than a journal of events and experiences, the essays consider many of life's more profound issues and concerns with insight, optimism and humor.
Fizzy Oceans lives, works and travels in the virtual world where with the click of a button one is transported throughout the Ages to events and destinations that make up our human history.
Poetry, Short Stories & Novellas
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As long as I reside in their minds and hearts, I will never truly be gone.

The devastation caused by World War II is described by historians in terms of military strategies and battles, the toll on economics, and the numbers of dead. But only the stories of those whose lives were changed or lost, can convey the true horror of the war. These were people very much like ourselves—men, women, children, siblings, poets, soldiers, students, professionals, laborers, givers, takers, jokers, dancers, lovers, dreamers, cowards and brave. 

Each is the hero of his own tale. Each tale underscores the uniqueness of human perception based upon personality and circumstances. 

By listening to the voices of those with stories to tell, we can grow in our appreciation of what it means to be human. 

WAR CRIES: UNHEARD STORIES, UNMARKED GRAVES provides a stage for the voices—many inspired by people present in Europe during World War II—to speak their truths. The characters behind the poems come from different religions, different professions, and different ideologies. 

Like all of us, they want to be heard. They want to be understood. Most of all…they want to be remembered.
Almost everybody who was born in the post-agrarian period separated by the two great wars grew up in a place whose growing pains were painfully obvious. 

It was into such a place that my parents moved with my brother and me in tow. Our house was small, but serviceable; our neighbors forthcoming, but not so morbidly curious that they pried, and our world expanded in one way as it shrank in another. The sky was as blue as it is said to be in heaven. And we were so adrift in space and time that we became the terrestrial astronauts that so troubled Rod Serling that he had to write something about us each week for television.

Here the Main Streets of our grandparents were left to developers, who preferred parking lots to promenades. Here generously proportioned school buildings beckoned to a fertile population that would supply them so handily that, once a prototype was made, it could be endlessly reproduced. Here pastimes flourished as they never had before. 

Here mostly white people settled in as Ricky Nelson serenaded them. Here needs were synonymous with desires. And here a culture that was made possible by the received wisdom of Father Coughlin, Leo Durocher, and Lawrence Welk sat back, adjusted its goggles, and proceeded, with limitations that grew with every sack of fertilizer that guaranteed a more perfect lawn, to have the time of its life.

It was here that I grew up and here (mostly) that I have roamed, from ball field to abbreviated living room to the topsy-turvy relations between hard reality and plausible delusion. I hope, in capturing some of its essence in prose, that the small underbellies which often lurk beneath the bigger ones become crudely, if only temporarily, visible.
Nonfiction
Tales from The Warming is unique in the annals of climate fiction, a new literary genre spawned in the last decade by the climate crisis. The anthology of 10 short stories takes readers all over the world and over time to experience—in human terms—the growing impact of what the author has dubbed “The Warming,” the man-made catastrophe that is increasing the world’s temperature, raising ocean levels and causing increasingly violent weather.

The stories—powerful, prophetic and poignant—are thought exercises that blend fact and fiction to examine the human impact of the crisis. They are based on current worst-case scenarios proposed by climate science. Each concerns a different challenge thrust upon us by the warming. In them readers witness people’s struggles to deal with these new realities. Some of the stories put people in harm’s way; others focus more on human creativity in mitigating its effects.

Story locations range from Bangladesh to Venice, Los Angeles to Polynesia, South Sudan to Southwestern China, Mount Kilimanjaro to the Persian Gulf, Miami to Greenland. The time frame is 2022 to 2059, a period during which the world is beginning to suffer the far reaching effects of this civilization-changing phenomenon.
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In Justice and Vengeance, Arwen Bicknell offers the first full account of the events leading up to the shooting of James Clark by Lucien Fewell and the sensational, headline-grabbing murder trial that followed. Set against the backdrop of Reconstruction, tumultuous Virginia politics, and the presidential election of 1872 featuring Ulysses Grant, Horace Greeley, and protofeminist Victoria Woodhull, the first female presidential candidate, Bicknell paints a vivid picture of the evolving South as she traces the families and fortunes of Lucien Fewell, a hellraiser with a passion for drink and for abusing Yankees and scalawags, and James Clark, a rising legal and political star with a wife, a daughter, and a baby on the way.

 
We still seem to believe in the ‘the ascent of man’ and that we are superior to all other species, so surely we must be in charge of our destinies. But is it any more valid, believing a man is superior to a butterfly because he is cleverer, than believing a butterfly is superior to a man because it is more beautiful? It has been suggested that our unashamed vanity has been dealt three serious blows. The first was cosmological, dealt by Copernicus in 1543, who showed that we were not at the center of the universe; the second was biological, dealt by Darwin in 1859, who showed that we were just one small branch of the evolutionary tree of life; and the third was psychological, dealt by Freud in 1900, who showed that the unconscious mind had a far greater influence on us than we had ever thought possible. To these might be added yet a fourth blow to our vanity. It is a blow that is gradually being exposed by the inquiry into what makes us feel and think and act the way we do and how much our heredity and environmental experiences influence our behavior. Perhaps we’re not quite as in charge of our destinies as we thought we were. Most of us think we learn from our experiences but perhaps we can do so only retrospectively and that this process is less about learning than conditioning.


Clinical Dicta and Contra Dicta examines the therapy process both from the inside out and the outside in. Over many years of sitting with patients and supervisees, John Espy found that the themes presented in his office had threads of similarities. Are we winsome or loathsome? Do we desire self-knowing or do we seek out more psychically sophisticated ways of self-deception? Psychotherapy and psychoanalysis is a psychic pilgrimage that reveals the depths of both our capacity to love and our capacity for hate. Life is not clean and no one gets out unscathed. We are fraught with temptations and unconscious desires to deceive ourselves by engaging in behaviors that undermine our own best self-interests. The best therapy results in an exploration of our illusions of who we imagine ourselves to be confronted by who in fact we are. 

Clinical Dicta and Contra Dicta explores these issues both visually and in narrative form. Iconic adages and clinical vignettes are presented as well as a treatise on how serial perpetrators use projective-identification to groom and ultimately ensnare their victims.
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Wings of a 
Flying Tiger
by Iris Yang
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World War Two. Japanese occupied China. One cousin's courage, another's determination to help a wounded American pilot.

In the summer of 1942, Danny Hardy bails out of his fighter plane into a remote region of western China. With multiple injuries, malaria, and Japanese troops searching for him, the American pilot’s odds of survival are slim. 

Jasmine Bai, an art student who had been saved by Americans during the notorious Nanking Massacre, seems an unlikely heroine to rescue the wounded Flying Tiger. Daisy Bai, Jasmine’s younger cousin, also falls in love with the courageous American.

With the help of Daisy’s brother, an entire village opens its arms to heal a Flying Tiger with injured wings, but as a result of their charity the serenity of their community is forever shattered. 

Love, sacrifice, kindness, and bravery all play a part in this heroic tale that takes place during one of the darkest hours of Chinese history.
A tale of gas, grass, ass, and Vietnam.  

Air Force pilot Slats Kisov's courage is audacious, his strategy is devil-may-care, and his luck is impeccable until his plane is shot down over the jungle and he sustains the “million-dollar injury”―one that leaves him no less audacious if just slightly less fertile. 

But war has made Slats something of an adrenaline junkie, and he returns to the States determined to live a life of harmless banditry from the cockpit of an airplane. Using his exceptional low-and-slow flying skills, he smuggles marijuana into Florida from the Bahamas aided by his friends the Morales brothers.  

Generally, Slats enjoys good fortune as he wobbles through life, but his luck takes an appalling turn when Bobby Ray Pistle, police chief of Farth, Florida, suspects that Slats is running weed. Pistle’s bulb burns too dimly to find proof, but when the chief discovers his lusty ex has fallen for Slats, it’s time to fish or cut bait.  

Will Slats’ former battles with the Viet Cong, hijackers, PTSD, and Mother Nature prepare him for his most perilous battle of all―the one he must wage against Chief Bobby Ray Pistle? Strap yourself in and get ready for a bumpy ride. And one spectacular landing!
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Rosemary in Bloom by Khristy Reibel
The 13 by Lorin R. Robinson
The 13 (Ashi-niswi)
by Lorin R. Robinson

A gripping adventure in which 13 young Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) seek to regain the honor of their band. 

"A delightful work of historical fiction.”—Midwest Book Review

Following a devastating raid on their camp, 13 Anishinaabe teenagers vow to restore the honor of their band by tracking down and savaging the Dakota raiders. The story is a parable posing the universal question: “What is the price of honor?” It is also a poignant coming-of-age story as the youngest of the youthful warriors struggles to come to grips with the aftermath of 
the quest.
The Swan Keeper by Milana Marsenich
The Swan Keeper
by Milana Marsenich

Girlhood, courage, nature, and flight from a tyrant’s hand in post-frontier Montana.

The Swan Keeper is an historical, coming of age novel set in Northwest Montana's Mission Valley in the late 1920s.
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The Novels of Milana Marsenich
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Passionate and forbidden love clashes with tradition and caste in a changing India.

Kamala Kumari is more than a Gemini Studio starlet: she’s a classical dancer trained in the age-old line of Devadasis, a caste set in place a thousand years ago when girls were first dedicated in south Indian temples to serve the gods and men. Beautiful, brilliant and proud, Kamala struggles to escape the old ways, entangling her Indian assistant, Dutch lover, and his young American wife.

With its turbulent passions amid social upheavals, The Last Devadasi takes readers on a sensual feast in the 1970s palm-shaded trading city of Madras.
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Sworn brothers. Captured, imprisoned, and tortured. Survival is just the beginning of the battle...

In 1942, Birch Bai, a Chinese pilot, and Danny Hardy, a downed American pilot, become sworn brothers and best friends.

In the summer of 1945, both airmen’s planes go down in Yunnan Province of China during one of many daring missions. They are captured, imprisoned, and tortured by the Japanese for information about the atomic bomb. Just days before the end of WWII, Danny makes an irrevocable decision to save Birch's life.

For Birch, surviving the war is only the beginning of the battle. He must deal with the dreadful reality in China—the civil war, the separation of the country, the death of one friend in the Communist-controlled Mainland and another under the Nationalist government, and his wrongful imprisonment in Taiwan. 

From Chungking to Yunnan, and from Taiwan to San Francisco, the sequel to Wings of a Flying Tiger takes readers along on an epic journey.
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Will of a Tiger
by Iris Yang
The Novels of Barbara L. Baer
The 19 stories in marine scientist Stephen Spotte's latest collection penetrate the stormy, watery depth of the human psyche, blending elements of make-believe with sharp, systematic observations and insights into the twisted manifestations of life, love, and death. The tales skip across genres at breakneck speed, mixing humor and pathos with fantasy, sometimes in settings that juxtapose gritty reality with magical realism. Throughout, Spotte scrapes aside the thin patina of everyday existence, offering a glimpse into the strange abyssal world of his imagination.
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The Soulful Leader provides poignant and practical examples of Dr. Ciaramicoli's ground-breaking AIE (authenticity, integrity and empathy) leadership platform for leaders in all industries to help them successfully optimize the potential of employees.

AIE leadership produces an environment where staff members grow to respect each other while 
Considered an expert in the area of psychopathic behavior, Dr. Espy has interviewed more than 30 serial murderers throughout the world including Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Eddie Gein. 

But when he was assigned to be the lead evaluator for Montana State Prison inmate Nathaneal Bar Jonah, an already once convicted serial child molester and attempted murderer in Massachusetts, Espy encountered a parasitic personality beyond imagination: a modern-day Cronos, the Greek mythological figure who devoured his children. 

Weighing over 375 pounds, Bar Jonah worked as a short order cook at Hardy’s, carried a stun gun, impersonated police officers, told masterful lies, wrote unbreakable codes, cooked and shared with friends strange-tasting chili and spaghetti sauces, and was thought by Montana State detectives to have murdered and cannibalized at least one victim, 10-year-old Zach Ramsay.

Culled from hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with Bar Jonah, dozens of others who either knew or were involved with him, Montana State investigators and prosecutors, and Zach Ramsay’s mother, Espy retells Bar Jonah’s entire life—from the time before he was conceived to after his death—and those who were harmed by him in unparalleled detail and scope.

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A how-to guide for new and experienced collectors, How to Collect Great Art on a Shoestring explores the unique opportunity to acquire one-of-a-kind works for $2000 or $3000 by hundreds of mostly forgotten yet startlingly good artists who are in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Met, among many other museums. 

A veteran and avid collector, Gersh offers pro tips on how, what, and which artists to look for while providing unique insights, an invaluable perspective, and a dash of humor into the world of collecting great art.
Consider the Feast
by Carmit Delman

New York City is obsessed with food. Especially in the streets of The Quarter, every imaginable delicacy is made and devoured, every unspeakable hunger is fulfilled. 

Talia, a recent divorcee, comes to The Quarter to be reborn. She discovers fresh purpose in the sensual pleasures there, and a possible new love. But eventually she finds herself face to face with the darkness under its surface—in both the privileged patrons who feast there, and the third-world laborers who feed them.

Now Talia must separate the truth from the madness because in The Quarter, the haves and have-nots are about to face a reckoning.
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The Year of the Return
by Nathaniel Popkin

Paul Silk and Charlene Johnson are journalists whose love for each other and commitment to social justice were formed in the peace movements of the 1960s. But the idealism of that era leads to the urban deterioration of the 1970s. Mayor Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia is a place of crime, white flight, and class resentment that is inhospitable to their interracial marriage, forcing them to move away. But when Charlene dies of cancer, Paul returns. Unmoored and unable to let go of Charlene, he wades back into the lives of the two families, with the hope of helping Charlene's younger brother Monte, once a prodigy and now a troubled veteran of the Vietnam War. Their explosive reunion leads to the baring of personal revelations and dangerous secrets.


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The Four Trials of Henry Ford chronicles the Ford Motor Company founder's forays into landmark litigation during the early years of the twentieth century.

Piché follows Ford's lonely defense against alleged infringement of the Selden patent on the automobile brought by a powerful automotive monopoly determined to control prices and competition in the emerging automobile market. He explores a minority shareholder oppression lawsuit brought against Ford by the Dodge brothers who initially manufactured all of the mechanical parts for Ford's cars. He covers Ford's libel suit against the Chicago Tribune for calling him an "anarchist" and "ignorant idealist" in the midst of the patriotic fervor during the U.S. Mexico Intervention and the run-up to World War I, and finally, he examines a Jewish lawyer’s persistent libel action against Ford for the defamation of himself and his race in anti-Semetic diatribes widely published and circulated in his personally owned newspaper, The Dearborn Independent.

In recounting the Ford litigation, Piché examines Ford’s parallel manipulation of public media to advance his own political and narcissistic agenda to become a public sage and an American President. It follows the initial rise of his reputation as a Progressive capitalist to its ultimate erosion as a mean-spirited bigot and contributor to the propaganda that fueled the Holocaust.
​The Ice Palace Ice Palace Waltz 
by Barbara L. Baer

Two Jewish immigrant families—the rough and ready Western pioneers and the smooth, “our crowd” New Yorkers—come together in a riveting family saga amid the financial and social tumult of early twentieth century America. Baer's moving multigenerational novel traces the American Jewish experience and the enduring power of family and love.
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Pretty Chrysanthemum and Other Stories reminds readers how family is at the core of human experience and how relationships, especially those between parent and child, rely on the power of love to overcome challenges. Endearing characters, with their flaws and strengths, persevere to make right decisions, even when the outcome is in doubt.
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In China's political chaos, a woman's desperate search for her family and the American pilot she loves.

In the winter of 1942, Jasmine Bai survived the freezing wilderness and decided to keep her baby, even though he was the product of a gang-rape by Japanese soldiers. In 1947, her quiet life in a remote cabin was disrupted by the news of her loved one's death. In the following four decades, Jasmine desperately searches for her family and for Danny Hardy, the American pilot she loves. She is robbed by thugs, thrown in jail by the Nationalist Secret Police, and wrongfully accused by the Communists. In war and political chaos, Jasmine loses her loved ones, but she never loses her sense of decency, nor does she break her promise to the Flying Tiger. Over thousands of miles between Yunnan and Chungking, the third book of the Tiger Saga trilogy takes readers along another incredible journey.

Open Books will publish the much anticipated third book of the Tiger Saga Trilogy, Legacy of the Tigers, in Spring 2020.

Legacy of 
the Tigers
by Iris Yang
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Introspective, unapologetic, and brave, Natasha's Not My Name is inspirational reading for all women.

Dancer and actress Isabella Grosso introduces readers to the complex underground of the strip club industry as seen from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old as she struggles, and ultimately survives as a child-turned-adult with a double life.

Natasha's Not My Name delves deeply into the dark pockets of sexual abuse, suicide, drug use, exploitation, and the inner strength it takes for a wounded child to grow up to be a strong woman, and what ultimately saves her: a love for dance and the arts, and a desire to share her story to help girls in equally vulnerable situations.
Visit all 54 African countries with an adventurous American guide who has spent over half a century on the continent.

Africa Memoir tells the incredible lifetime story of Mark G. Wentling, a boy from Kansas who grew up to travel, work, and visit all 54 African countries. Derived from over a half century spent working and living on the African continent, Wentling devotes a chapter to each country describing his firsthand experiences, eye-opening impressions, and views on future prospects.

Original and authoritative, this one-of-a-kind, three-volume work deserves a special place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in Africa.

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In 1977, Mark Wentling began working for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Niger and later served as its principal officer in Guinea, Togo/Benin, Angola, Somalia and Tanzania. Following retirement from the U.S. Senior Foreign Service in 1996, Mark continued to work as an advisor for the Great Lakes Region, then with USAID Missions in Zambia, Malawi, Guinea and Senegal. 

He subsequently worked with CARE, World Vision and Plan International in Niger, Mozambique and Burkina Faso. In recent years, he has worked in Ghana, Mali and Angola. His many jobs and travels in Africa, visiting all 54 African countries, contributed to the completion of his latest book, Africa Memoir: 50 Years, 54 Countries, One American Life. Those who know him well say he was born and raised in Kansas but made in Africa.

Mark currently maintains a home in Lubbock, Texas, but he continues to travel frequently to Africa to work. He has also designed a course in international development for Texas Tech University. He holds a master’s degree in International Agriculture from Cornell University and a master’s degree in Strategic Studies from the National War College. In 2014, he was awarded by the WSU Alumni Association its annual alumni achievement award.


Gregory R. Piché is a Denver lawyer who has practiced as a litigator for 45 years. He teaches law and ethics in a graduate degree program at the University of Colorado. 
Arthur P. Ciaramicoli
In The Triumph of Diversity, Dr. Ciaramicoli analyzes prejudice by tracing it to personal origins and relates true stories of courageous individuals who have overcome hatred, cruelty and sadism to become open-minded, loving resilient people. He re-emphasizes that we are in desperate need of those who unite rather than those who ostracize.
producing on the highest possible level.

Dr. Ciaramicoli has developed this approach during 35 years of consulting with and counseling 

leaders in business, education, politics, and on athletic teams. His communication and leadership groups have been ongoing for over 30 years, which has allowed him to study the personal characteristics that lead to excellent leadership skills. His pioneering approach offers new promise to a society struggling with fear and doubt about those in powerful positions. 
Easy-to-use guides devoted to Paris, Pilgrimage to Paris: The Cheapo Snob’s Guide to the City and the Americans Who Lived There and Paris and Parisians: The Cheapo Snob Explores the City and Its Famous French Residents include travel tips, main attractions, free (and nearly free) things to do, shopping, museums, churches, cafes, and restaurants. The book also provides short biographies and addresses associated with famous Americans—writers, journalists, politicians, musicians and performers, artists and architects, and several other interesting people who don’t fit neatly into typical categories—who spent time living la belle vie in the French capital.
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What are borders? Are they simply political and geographical, marked by posts, walls and fences, or should we think of them more broadly? Consider the borders within countries, determined by race, ethnicity, or caste. Borders may be physical and economic, and even perceptual—the borders of our minds. 

In Postcards from the Borderlands, historian and journalist David Mould rambles through a dozen countries in Asia, Southern Africa and Eastern Europe by car, bus, train, shared taxi and ferry, exploring what borders mean to their peoples.

Mould finds topics of interest even in the most ordinary places—an airport departure lounge, a food court, a roadside restaurant, a government office. Every road trip offers a moving window display of landscape features, crops, livestock, houses, churches, temples, mosques, schools, factories, military bases, vehicles. He notes what people are selling on the roadside and the markets, the restaurant menu, the indecipherable instructions for the TV remote in his hotel room. What people wear. What they eat. How they talk to each other. The questions they ask him. The questions he asks them. Away from the tourist hotspots, he finds that it is often the commonplace that is most fascinating and revealing of culture.
From First Kiss to Forever: A Scientific Approach to Love is a fun and humorous, yet scientific, book about relationships. This book introduces the reader to relationship science. The chapters examine how people meet, select their mates, and fall in and out of love. 

Readers need not be scientists to understand the information presented. Each chapter relates present-day research to everyday experiences and real relationship issues confronted by couples. Each ends with take home tips/questions to help the reader apply the lessons in his/her own life.

Do you want to understand the science behind finding a mate, maintaining long-lasting relationships, or even what makes some relationships doomed to fail? Help your relationships grow and flourish, and have a few hearty laughs along the way.
Marisa T. Cohen, Ph.D
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Rodell writes about America the way Sinatra sings about New York, unflinching about the gritty realities, but with abiding affection and relentless positivity about the future.”
—Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge

Ever wonder how old you’ll be in heaven? If righteous cavemen and women will make the heavenly cut? And, gee, if marriage is so great then how come there’s no Mrs. God? Chris Rodell wonders about stuff like that all the time. He wonders about holidays, occupations, traffic and if refrigerating your deodorant adds zing to your morning.

It’s a zany world out there and it takes a nimble mind to sort it all out. Rodell does it with style, warmth, an engaging euphoria and undaunted optimism that lets every reader know he enjoys being human and enjoys human beings.
While spending thirty years overseas in the US Foreign Service, and living in eleven countries and working in many more, Ambassador Lucke accumulated many stories that would never have happened “at home.” His work took him to Timbuktu (twice), to places in West Africa where kids ran away in fear at their first glimpse of a person with white skin, to the scary run up to Gulf War I in North Africa, to the jungles of Bolivia and Lake Titicaca in the Andes, the fall of Communism in the old Czechoslovakia, biblical sites of Jerusalem, the passing of King Hussein in Jordan, to interaction with a few US Presidents and many members of Congress. He was thrust into the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, deployed into the war zone of Iraq, and finally served as US Ambassador to the last absolute monarchy in Africa. His take on a thirty-year career abroad: “It was never boring.”
Ambassador Lucke re-opening school after Haiti earthquake
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"Heaven and Other Zip Codes deals with marital relationships and their complexities faithfulness, divorce, gender roles, etc.), but the narrative is about so much more. Readers will fall in love with this page-turning, brilliant novel. Cailler is destined for an award with this newest post-modern masterpiece."  —Niles Reddick, Midwest Book Review

Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
In early twentieth century Van Lear, Kentucky, miners in a conscripted coal town go down to work in the shaft only to come back up in pieces.

Company-hired detectives and preachers terrorize the workforce, their women and widows, and children into submission with threats of violence and eternal damnation while the Knights subjugate blacks to acts of unspeakable violence.

Slavery is a way of life. Murder is a daily occurrence.

Then one day in the Sugar Maple Grove, Moses Kitchen takes a stand against the members of the Ku Klux Klan sparking a small but enduring revolt against corporate, religious, and racial tyranny that finds its way throughout the generations from the son of a shoe salesman to a feisty, young female lawyer and beyond in this epic Southern Gothic about race, poverty, religion, and barbarism, and those brave enough to dare to see a different society.
More new titles from Open Books
For Jill Carstens it was an unspoken assumption that her family would live happily on Vivian Street forever. But that home lost, and at age sixteen, so was she. 



High school isn't easy, especially with a learning disability.


2018 Nautilus Award Winner!
There's more to see and experience in Paris than just the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, 
and the Louvre. 

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Killer Cocktail
​by David M. Hamlin
In the summer of 1977, Chicago’s WSMP-TV investigative reporter Emily Winter covers the confrontation between a woman’s health clinic fighting to preserve a woman’s right to choose and the equally ardent demonstrators fighting against that right. 


ISBN13: 978-1948598460
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Genre: Fiction
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Pot Luck
​by David L. Gersh

Things always seem to go wrong for Jimmy Harris. The small coastal town of San Buenasara is gripped in a recession. Jimmy’s law practice is in the tank.

Wee Willy’s is the hot pot company in town. And perhaps a way to stay afloat. Willy wants him to be president. To think, him a president.

Alas, things are not what they seem. Mysterious shell companies own the stock. The company is broke, even though boxes of cash keep arriving. Jimmy finds himself up to his eyebrows in a struggle between the law and shadowy people who will do anything to get their way. Is it the drug cartel? The Mafia? Or is it the FBI?

With the help of his once and future wife, Karen, and the resourcefulness of his law partner Clyde, maybe he can find a way out. And of course, Bruno, Karen and Jimmy’s long-haired dachshund, wants to help. He has a nose for mysteries.

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Mind Fields
​by Thomas Garlinghouse

A mystery novelist. A tormented physicist. A metaphysical adventure.

In the early 1950s, the People's Republic of China invaded and annexed Tibet, forever altering the country's political and social landscape. For mystery writer Taylor Hamilton and his wife, Kate, these events seem part of a remote, forgotten past. Having fled San Francisco for the quiet of a small, coastal town, all Taylor wants to do is surf and write mysteries.

But for Taylor's neighbor, an old man named Havelock Rowland, the invasion of Tibet—and its bloody aftermath—are forever emblazoned on his psyche. Reclusive and secretive, Havelock is a retired physicist who lives alone with an immense black dog and harbors a complicated and painful personal history.

Gradually but inexorably, Taylor is drawn into Havelock's world of Tibetan metaphysics, and soon the past clashes with the present as strange events emerge to overtake the picturesque coastal town.
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If Ignorance is Bliss... explores the limitations of knowledge and argues that neither reasoning nor direct observation can be trusted. Not only are they unreliable sources, but they do not even justify assigning probabilities to claims about what we can know. This position, called radical skepticism, has intrigued philosophers since before the birth of Christ, yet nobody has been able to refute it.

Fred Leavitt supports abstract arguments with summaries of real-life examples from many and varied fields, which make the arguments much more convincing and compelling. He cites more than 200 studies from psychology, mathematics, chaos theory, quantum mechanics, evolutionary theory, history, the corporate world, politics, the military, and current news reporting. Leavitt's writing is user-friendly, even when dealing with complex issues.

Whether answering the telephone, turning on the TV, talking with friends, or munching on an apple, we expect things to happen predictably. These expectations, paired with radical skepticism, exemplify cognitive dissonance at the highest level. 


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Each year, more and more Americans adopt extreme views to the right or to the left. America Reunited attempts to provide first-care for the current and serious conflicts that ail us as a society: racism, sexism, immigration, poverty, increases in suicide, and alcoholism and overdoses, as well as address the reasons for the political misinformation that is prevalent every day through various news sources and social medial sites.

Nutritionists tell us that we are what we eat. As a clinical psychologist, Arthur P. Ciaramicoli believes that we are what we perceive. We are in a dark time and in need of enhanced empathy to allow us to regain our civility and our sense of reason. The cancer in our country is deep and it is growing, but it is still curable if we devise a treatment plan that we are all willing to implement.
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The untold story of the Angel of Santa Fe and the Gettysburg of the West. 

This is the story, based on historical events, of the little known War of New Mexico, of Henry Sibley, who commanded the Texas Mounted Volunteers, Edward R. S. Canby, the Union commander, and his wife Louisa, the Angel of Santa Fe. It explores the desperate struggle at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, called the Gettysburg of the West, and the men who fought on both sides. It examines the tragedies of war and the passion and compassion of those men and women who played a part.  

Through letters, diaries, newspaper articles and both first and third person exposition and dialogue, this deeply-researched historical fiction tells of those who heard The Whisper of a Distant God.
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Ingrained, enthralled and overwhelmed with the prevailing creed, "Communism will one day seize the world," and following Mao's call to the young during the Cultural Revolution, Cheng Wang, a so-called ‘Educated Youth’, boarded a train destined for a secluded village in Inner Mongolia for the compulsory period of re-education. For the next three grueling years in rural exile, he pondered how his once-privileged, loving family had been caught in a political undertow, and indeed how his own future might unfold?

From Tea to Coffee is the story of struggle and triumph during China’s modern-day cultural and political drama, and is a rare and personal account that showcases the Chinese national psyche. Like all political movements of the past, the Cultural Revolution was not the first of its kind, nor quite possibly the last, yet Cheng Wang, now at home in both America and in China, maintains an optimism that is rare and so very welcome in confronting today's social polarization in the East and in the West. 
​Where do you look once the search has ended?

Mysteries—and comedy—abound in this stand-alone novel that also continues the stories of Phillip and Spencer Elliot first explored in the novel Mr. Wizard. The middle-aged brothers undertake a quest inspired by their dead mother to discover "wonderful things" – the phrase used by archaeologist Howard Carter in describing his first look into King Tut's tomb.
Piecing together the fabric of a family's loss.

For precocious eight-year-old Kate Nichols, life in suburban New York seems pretty ordinary for the late 1960s. There are ballet classes, pet bunnies and air raid drills, outings to grandparents’ homes and humiliating boys in chino pants. She derives strength from the surgeon father she idolizes and her family’s lineage of dressmakers, all of them sewers who plan and execute with precision.

But Kate’s understanding of her world is shattered when her mother announces that she had an older brother who died inexplicably in the hospital just days after his birth. As she navigates adolescence, she must choose whether to crack open the mystery or acquiesce to the family’s established pattern of secrecy and repression. It’s not until she is a single mother that her own feelings of loss trigger a search into the past, revealing a tale of generational trauma, maternal strength and how far we’ll go to protect the people we love.

Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
As miners in hard hats swing pick axes miles underground, the Devil comes calling disguised as a black dust. The dirty soot penetrates deep into the miners' lungs. The first sign is coughing up black phlegm. Then comes wheezing 
pain in the chest, and the desperation of being unable to breathe. The Devil tightens its noose around the miners' throats as coal dust invades their chests like a marauding invader that has come to desecrate their lungs. Then, after years of suffering and torture, the Devil claims each victim.

Such is the fate of the coal miner. Not one, not two, but thousands of men suffer the fate of black lung disease. Lied to for a century by the coal companies, pursued by cowardly goons and unscrupulous doctors as the tragedy continues in the name of profit.

Three physicians dare to put their reputations, and at times their lives, on the line to expose the plight of the miners. Doctors Kitchen, McGarrity and McIntosh fight not only for miners' rights but also for their dignity. They try to discover ways of diagnosing black lung disease that can't be dismissed or shamed by the coal companies or their physician cronies. The Devil in the Dust is a story about courage, not only of the physicians confronting the coal companies and their stooges, but the courage of the coal miners to persevere in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
Goldfinch in the Thistle follows the lifelong love story of James V, King of Scotland, and his mistress, Maggie Erskine.

Marriage is impossible, even after Maggie gives birth to a royal son. Margaret Tudor, the king’s mother, longs to bring her son and her brother Henry VIII into an alliance with a marriage to an English noble or princess and fulfill her promise to her father to join Scotland and England together. Meanwhile the King’s secretary, Thomas Erskine, who has a salacious secret, encourages a royal French marriage. Both James and Maggie know that a royal marriage—something which Maggie cannot provide—will bring much needed money to build Scotland and keep the King’s uncle from subsuming it under England’s cloak.

But when the new Queen of Scots finally arrives at Stirling Castle, what will it mean for Maggie and her son?

Set in sixteenth century Scotland, Goldfinch in the Thistle is a story of unfulfilled promises, loyalties, and shifting perspectives.

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Within these halls of learning, one must proceed with caution.

Happily ensconced as a tenured Professor of Biology at the small Skowhegan College in the wilds of Maine, Tymoteusz Tarnaszewski—who goes by the moniker "T"—suddenly finds himself in unknown territory when an incident in a colleague's classroom motivates the college administration to issue a blanket policy requiring the installation of "trigger warnings" in all syllabi.

T, believing that this would constrain his teaching, refuses to comply, even after one of his own students lodges a complaint about something T said during the course of a genetics lecture. The administration's judgment is swift: T will be terminated at semester's end for insubordination.

What recourse, if any, does T have to save his position? And what will he do when he learns the higher-ups knew, early on, that the student who lodged the complaint against him is actually a threat to the school? 

Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
A smart, fast, funny, and incisive portrait of today's liberal arts college scene, cancel culture—and more!

A chance encounter—if it is by chance—gives J. the opportunity he’s been hoping for but never expected would present itself. A physician in a midlife funk, obsessed with paintings of corpses and dissections, he is asked to speak about his subject of interest at the beautiful and secluded island campus of Nevergreen College. “Welcome to the asylum!” announces the woman who arranged the invitation and greets him at the dock, and his restless stomach seems an eerie harbinger of what is to come—an initially curious and ultimately terrifying overview of academentia. No one actually shows up for his lecture, but that doesn’t stop it from becoming the center of a firestorm of controversy—with potentially fatal consequences. 
Beautiful Ghost
Milana Marsenich

Sequel to the bestselling Copper Sky!

During the fall of 1918, the influenza pandemic crosses the nation and reaches the mining town of Butte, Montana.

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The Novels of Khristy Reibel
Goldfinch in the Thistle
by Khristy Reibel

Goldfinch in the Thistle follows the lifelong love story of James V, King of Scotland, and his mistress, Maggie Erskine.

Marriage is impossible, even after Maggie gives birth to a royal son. But when the new Queen of Scots finally arrives at Stirling Castle, what will it mean for Maggie and her son?

Set in sixteenth century Scotland, Goldfinch in the Thistle is a story of unfulfilled promises, loyalties, and shifting perspectives.
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The members of Uncle Joe’s Band have spent years playing any venue that will pay for their unintelligible metal band performances while their rock and roll lifestyle has left them with bad livers, multiple divorces, and living in a squalid house in Vallejo, California.

Then one morning everything changes when an assertive twelve-year-old girl named Allison appears on their front porch and announces that she has been sent to stay with her father for the summer.  

Meanwhile, years ago, the band’s namesake and inspiration, Uncle Joe, takes a long strange trip as a vagabond hippie through the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s that includes brushes with Ken Kesey’s bus, Watergate, the Pet Rock, Iran Contra, and Jerry Garcia. 

Inspired by their experience with Allison and their budding paternal instincts, recollections of Uncle Joe, and a well-played Stratocaster with the initials “JG”, the members of Uncle Joe’s Band begin to play a new tune in a major key. 

Winner Next Generation Indie Book Awards
Chosen as a book club selection for
The Four Bridges Project Book Club
Selected for the curriculum of
University of Maine Pop!Tech 
course
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Startup
by Riko Radojcic
​The high tech mystery/thrillers of Riko Radojcic
3 'Literary' Mysteries
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Chechnya: The Inside Story
From Independence to War
by Mairbek Vatchagaev

In Chechnya: The Inside Story historian and former advisor to the president of Chechnya, Mairbek Vatchagaev chronicles the dramatic events that took place in Chechnya during the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Engaged on one side of the Russian-Chechen conflict, he presents what he witnessed, how he became involved, how the struggle with Russia and the internal Chechen rivalries evolved, and how it impacted his family, his friends, his acquaintances, and the Chechen people.

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The band is back!

Instead of playing in rundown bars, Uncle Joe’s Band now sell out concert halls.

Prior to a tour in Japan, a letter arrives claiming one of the band members, Ian, is the father of an unnamed young woman, who coincidentally is the member of another band, Stygian Teal. In the hopes of identifying Ian’s daughter, Uncle Joe’s Band attends a Stygian Teal concert. Much to their surprise, they find not one, but four Stygian Teal band members, any of which could be Ian’s daughter.

Meanwhile, as the band’s namesake Uncle Joe, an aged deadhead, makes his way across North America during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, another Uncle Jo, Joji Kinsara, makes his way across the Japanese archipelago. Everywhere he goes, Joji leaves large painted haiku poems, which become noted works of art. In his travels Joji visits the Nagano Winter Olympics, starts an environmental revitalization of Mt. Fuji, and helps ensure that a young Masako Owada becomes a future empress.

As they journey through Japan, Uncle Joe’s Band attempts to discern which young woman is Ian’s daughter, how to deal with newfound fame, and what it takes to formulate a family.



The Novels of Stephen Spotte
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Will a family curse lead to an ultimate sacrifice?



Such Stuff as Dreams 
by Thomas Garlinghouse 

Historical fiction blended with supernatural elements to create a story in which the past impinges on the present and ancient bonds of friendship and loyalty transcends time. 

It’s 1936 and Hollywood screenwriter Joe Holliday has a secret. He can see and communicate with ghosts. But because of a difficult childhood, he has long suppressed his ability. 

When the mercurial head of Apex Studios tasks him with writing a modern version of a Shakespeare play, Joe gradually regains his ability. Reopening himself to the spirit world brings him into contact with an old acquaintance—someone from his very distant past. This persistent, and very illustrious, spirit has a different writing task for him—some unfinished business the two had embarked upon over 400 years ago. 

When these two tasks ultimately come into conflict, Joe is forced to choose. It is a decision that will have far-reaching, life-changing consequences. 


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All's Fair:
A Jonathan Benjamin Franklin Mystery
David L. Gersh

Why would Pamela Knorrington claim a painting was stolen from a museum that had never heard of it? Is she crazy? Or can a thief make works of art disappear?

In desperation Pamela calls her friend, Mimi Aaron, the billionaire, Simon Aaron’s ex-wife. Her tale arouses Mimi’s curiosity. The weather in New York has been lousy and Mimi is bored silly. Los Angeles looks pretty tempting.

She recruits a reluctant Jonathan Benjamin Franklin to assist her. Jonathan’s wife, Nicole DeSant, is seven months pregnant and Jonathan isn’t about to leave. But Mimi Aaron can be very persuasive indeed. Besides, Nicole has Rufus, her beloved pug, to watch over her. And while Jonathan is a dear, he does tend to hover a bit too much.

In the wilds of Bel Air, working night and day, Mimi and Jonathan seek to unravel the mystery. And they discover … nothing. Then Pamela Knorrington disappears.

Jonathan is once again in over his head. Maybe he just should stop digging. Particularly since a Columbian drug lord would like to bury him.

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Quantum Voices
Stephen Spotte

Anax Grayson, a neuroscientist and physicist, enlists in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War and is assigned to an undermanned reconnaissance team. One member, Skeeter Hatfield, came of age in a southern West Virginia coal camp and suffered since childhood from a rare malady known as heautoscopic hallucinations during which he sees ghostly, extra-corporeal projections of his dead twin brother. In a journal Grayson records life as a field Marine, his observations of Hatfield’s neurological condition, and speculates about matter and time. Hatfield survives a mortar attack and returns home with debilitating wounds. He marries a childhood acquaintance and with her help tries to overcome the terrifying hallucinations of his antagonistic Other. Spotte’s narrative mosaic juxtaposes the dysfunctional, barely literate Hatfield family against Grayson’s sympathetic erudition, weaving a mesmerizing disquisition on friendship, love, notions of time and space, neuroscience, quantum physics, consciousness, and the myths of agency and selfhood.
The Novels of John E. Espy
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One of 28 typical multi-star Amazon reviews:

Amber
5.0 out of 5 stars 
Addicting, couldn’t put it down
Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2018

It’s been a long time since I was able to read a book all the way through. I will start a book out it down and forget about it. NOT this one. I could stop reading. In fact I finished it the same day I started it. It made me laugh, it made me cry. I wanted more. I was sad that it was over but happy that I got to read it and that I got a glimpse into a story, a true love story that wasn’t just all rainbows. I loved the way the chapters were set up, I felt that it kept the book going and interesting because it went back and forth between the two main characters. I suggest this book to anyone who is looking for a good read. Excellent job. I hope that this author will write more soon!!
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