In his new book, Destiny’s Voyage: SS Atlantic, Titanic of 1873, author Robert “Bob” Love tells the story of the world’s worst non-military sea disaster prior to the RMS Titanic in 1912. The book is a dual narrative, weaving together the story of the ship’s ill-fated maiden voyage with the transcripts of the Board of Trade hearings that investigated the disaster.
Love’s grandfather was a passenger on the SS Atlantic, and the author’s own family history is deeply intertwined with the story of the ship. This personal connection gives Love’s writing a unique perspective, and his passion for the subject matter is evident throughout the book.
Destiny’s Voyage is a well-researched and engaging read. Love does an excellent job of bringing the ship and its passengers to life, and he provides a detailed account of the disaster. The book is also a valuable resource for anyone interested in maritime history.
In addition to the historical narrative, Destiny’s Voyage also explores the themes of destiny and fate. Love argues that the SS Atlantic was doomed from the start, and he traces the ship’s downfall to a series of seemingly insignificant events. This exploration of fate and free will is thought-provoking and raises some interesting questions about the nature of destiny.
Overall, Destiny’s Voyage is a well-written and informative book that tells a fascinating story. It is a must-read for anyone interested in maritime history or the Titanic disaster.
Love’s writing is clear and engaging, and he does a good job of balancing the historical narrative with the more personal aspects of the story. The book is well-researched, and Love provides a wealth of information about the SS Atlantic and the disaster that befell her. The book is also thought-provoking, and Love’s exploration of the themes of destiny and fate is interesting and thought-provoking.
Overall, we would highly recommend Destiny’s Voyage to anyone interested in maritime history or the Titanic disaster. It is a well-written, informative, and thought-provoking book.
The Winds of Malibu is the true story of a boy whose father (a computer engineer with a grudge against Hollywood) has held on to a house in the movie colony of Malibu, California, after a bitter divorce. At the age of eleven, Lucas is fiercely bitten by the Acting Bug and does anything to act. A war between him and his controlling father regarding his Hollywood aspirations ensues amid crippling anxiety attacks. The story of an outrageous upbringing, where friends are preferable to parents, and Lucas relies on his diary to guide him. Lucas’s peers at school will become Hollywood’s top actors in the coming decade. The ultra-quirky, stormy, funny account of an extraordinary boy’s struggle to hang onto his dream.
REVIEW
It is perhaps unavoidably funny that I must now, as a reviewer, attempt to explain The Winds of Malibu: An Unexplainable Memoir to you. However, this is precisely the kind of humor author Jeff Lucas would find amusing himself. After all, what is a memoir but a sustained attempt to translate personal experience into a form that others understand? The book’s subtitle leaves its first hints of dark and sideways humor, the kind of humor that may take you into the trash heaps of Malibu and shadowy memories of childhood fears but also sees the virtue of getting bit in the buttocks by a neighbor’s dog.
I must admit I didn’t grow up in Malibu during the 1970s. Still, Lucas does a great job summoning the place for me, especially its ragtag bands of roving, undersupervised, and extremely hormonal children who found their best entertainment came from shoplifting the candy aisle at Trances Market and one-upmanship in sowing their earliest wild oats. This is not the Malibu of today, or at least not entirely, with horseback riding the unwashed hills still a typical family outing. Upon returning to this Malibu after several years away, Lucas must figure out exactly who he wants to be.
“What kind of juvenile delinquent are you?”
“A different kind, I suppose.”
Meanwhile, the conflict with his father is built up from the barest hints of foreshadowing (“My dad never had a true, trusted friend in his life. I hiked along and swigged water out of a shared thermos and thought about that.”) until the tension in their relationship reaches a fever pitch (“It was beautiful not to see my father’s face.”). All the while, Lucas lays out his days at school in Malibu, growing up and performing on the school stage alongside Emilio Estévez and others. (Ironically, I had just watched Estévez’s movie The Public shortly before picking up this book. Sometimes, the universe lines things up like that.) Lucas manages to sketch the many joys, impossibilities, and trials of youth by including selections from his diaries and other ephemera. The alternation between these sections and more traditional prose forces the reader to slow down and engage with each moment as it takes place on the page.
Although I grew up worlds away from Jeff Lucas, The Winds of Malibu: An Unexplainable Memoir did a fantastic job of acquainting me with the time and place. There’s an artfulness to the simplicity of his sentences and to the dialogue that reflects, in many ways, how young people see the world: deceptively simple on the surface but roiling with emotion and nuance underneath. But far and away, the book’s most compelling part was the
through-line of Lucas’s struggles with anxiety. His world was full of constant change despite his story of repeatedly returning to his father’s house in Malibu, and his mental health struggles make perfect sense in that context—although not the kind of sense that makes anxiety any easier to live through. His struggles feel very real and also very much a part of the larger architecture of this memoir, which chronicles not just a time and place and the boy who grew up within it, but also the sense of something lost that can never quite be found.
A quick reader’s advisory note: This book does deal with a good amount of “adult content,” which makes sense given the time and place (1970s Malibu and Hollywood), so be aware of that.
IN SUMMARY
A deeply personal and yet humorous account of one boy’s coming of age in Malibu, The Winds of Malibu: An Unexplainable Memoir is rich with juicy tidbits about Hollywood’s new elite. The story gathers further interest as it explores the conflict between father and son as the author battles to join his schoolmates’ names on the big screen.
I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
ABOUT KENDRA M.: With nine years in library service, six years of working within the self-publishing world, as well as extensive experience in creative writing, freelance online content creation, and podcast editing, Kendra seeks to amplify the voices of those who need and deserve most to be heard.
Mark Weber, President & CEO of the St. Louis Cardinals, thought he had landed his dream job. Little did he know it would turn into a nightmare shortly after management changes at the parent company Rheinhold Brewing Company.
Christina Rheinhold, newly installed President & CEO of the company that bears her name, is anxious to keep the small brewery afloat. What better way than to shed nonbeer assets? Especially if you don’t even care about the team, purchased by her father when In-Bev acquired Anheuser-Busch, and they were also in an off-loading situation. Christina [is] well aware of the 125-year-plus tradition of the team in St. Louis, but it [is] very tempting to sell the team to out-of-town parties for top dollar.
Can Mark, with the help of natural and even supernatural support, save the team for the city and its fans?
REVIEW
Baseball! So many different aspects of my life seem to tell me I should brush up on my (nearly nonexistent) knowledge of the sport. I spent my middle and high school years abroad in a country where baseball doesn’t exist, which probably explains why I know so little about the sport—including its history and its significance to Americans today. There are some similarities across sports: baseball and cricket, for example, are both considered “gentlemen’s sports” in that competition coexists with camaraderie, and umpires are as important as the players, their calls are of the utmost importance, and sassing an umpire is as gross a misdemeanor as exists. In many other ways, though, baseball and the culture that has formed around it is utterly unique. In A Sense of Urgency, Patrick McLean captures much of the detail and texture of daily life with baseball and infuses his book with the spirit of the same.
Like the sport itself, A Sense of Urgency is a dialogue-driven read. Thumb your way through the book, and you’re liable to land on a series of pages where most of the text printed on that page is spoken aloud by one character or another. McLean is somewhat unusual in this—in writing, I mean. My personal addiction when writing is to scenic description (sometimes, I think it’s all I know how to write), which was fairly common among the writers I became acquainted with back in college. There are also plenty of authors addicted to what you might call the Infodump, or worldbuilding, without much action in some genres. In moderation, both worldbuilding and scenic description can be useful. Still, as most of you can probably attest, something needs to happen in a book to keep the momentum going and readers engaged. Too much summary description of the action as it unfolds can come off as distant. (“He ran, then he stopped. He ate a sandwich. Then he moved to Alaska to learn how to muster sled dogs.”) It’s almost as if some writers (me included) can completely forget about the power of dialogue—but not Patrick McLean.
One of the benefits of a dialogue-driven book is that it doesn’t come off as teasing or deliberately disingenuous to withhold certain information until the critical moments in which those details are essential. A third-person omnipresent narrator, however, knows everything the character knows and can therefore be something of a tease in books that depend on the timing of those details for plot momentum and reader interest. (For example, if an author knows that it was Lady Scarlett in the dining room with the candlestick but asks me to consider the butler and Colonel Mustard as primary suspects, I start to wonder what else the narrator is hiding from me. And then I start skimming ahead. Because sometimes, I’m a very impatient reader! Whoops.) With dialogue, though, an author is fully justified in only conveying what the characters know or are willing to share at the moment since their voices are the only (or at least the dominant) voices on the page. This comes in very handy in A Sense of Urgency.
Dialogue also conveys personality and regionality like no other text can. Speech patterns, dialect, and idioms tell people who we are when we speak, more than our clothes and résumés since we can put on costumes and brag as much as we like. However, how we communicate and talk to each other will always reveal who we are underneath the affectations and behavioral habits we acquire.
When it comes to plot, there’s not much I can tell you about A Sense of Urgency that’s not already in the description without spoiling key details. Still, as the omnipresent narrator of this review, I’m going to tease you with hints at what you’ll discover when you crack open a copy for yourself. McLean’s command of the details is exquisite. (Who wears loafers without socks??! Who are these people? My mother would be mortified if she were caught out of doors without socks in her sneakers. I, meanwhile, wear sandals until the snow is thicker than the soles of my sandals. Then I switch to boots. I do not loaf. You’ll have to read on to discover why this is important in the book.)
The little things aren’t always little in this book. But that could also be a hint of misdirection; a Colonel Mustard moment of mine, if you will. (See? Don’t you hate it when a narrator tortures you? McLean doesn’t do this thanks to his dialogue-driven approach.) The Cardinals are more than just a team. Security is called to escort people out . . . and there are several moments where things get “a little dicey,” to steal an expression from the book. There’s plenty of drama to go around. But I won’t embarrass myself by trying to replicate McLean’s command of how baseball works and will simply state, instead, that this is a book focused on the game and what the game makes possible in the lives of those involved in it.
If you like baseball, or even if you know nothing about baseball but enjoy seeing just desserts dished out by knowledgeable and passionate characters, this is a book to add to your reading list.
IN SUMMARY
While the world keeps reminding me that Americans play baseball and not cricket, A Sense of Urgency pairs the sport with storytelling bound to appeal to fans and newcomers alike. And yes, Patrick McLean really does convey . . . a sense of urgency . . . in this compelling slice of life narrative.
WHERE TO BUY?
Learn more about Patrick McLean’s work on the book’s Outskirts Press author page.
I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
* Courtesy of Outskirts Press book listing.
ABOUT KENDRA M.: With nine years in library service, six years of working within the self-publishing world, as well as extensive experience in creative writing, freelance online content creation, and podcast editing, Kendra seeks to amplify the voices of those who need and deserve most to be heard.
After a long, successful career as the author of an esoteric newspaper column, “Rambling with Milton,” Jock Petitte finds himself unfulfilled and at loose ends. However, two failed marriages have not diminished his romantic ideals or his youthful desire to become an actor, so he begins composing one-man plays based on historical events and performing them at senior centers and retirement homes.
Prudence Rogers, beautiful and intelligent, has struggled with clinical depression and chronic anxiety throughout her life. So, when Jock meets her at the rehabilitation facility where she is recovering from an overdose, and he is performing a Christmas play, he is instantly smitten.Rambling with Milton is the deeply touching story of their romance and their attempt to save each other . . . and themselves.
REVIEW:
Rambling with Milton opens with a unique dedication, informing readers that the book was inspired by and contained excerpts from Senator Charles Sumner’s “Rape of Kansas” speech on the Senate Floor in 1856. This speech, also known as the “Crime of Kansas” speech, was delivered by Sumner in response to the “Bleeding Kansas” crisis, a series of deadly disputes over Kansas’s boundaries and slavery-related policies. (There’s a lot of history here, and I went waaay down the rabbit hole on Wikipedia reading up on the context.) Sumner, a fiery abolitionist, specifically denounced one particular (and influential) slaveholder who happened to be directly related to another senator, Preston Brooks, who went the extra mile in supporting South Carolina’s official stance on politics––by viciouslyattacking Sumner on the Senate Floor and stopping barely short of killing him. The incident helped inflame the intense emotions and political divisions of the wider American population in the years leading up to the Civil War. Nevertheless, the event was considered symbolic in 1856, and Richard Siciliano utilized excerpts from Sumner’s speech symbolically in Rambling with Milton in 2020.
With such an opening, you can be confident that I was hooked . . . even before I’d started the first page! If there’s something that I love, it’s a great historic textual reference, and even more specifically, a reference to a historic speech, as well as a reference to abolition, the Founding Fathers, and the hard work of shaping a new way of living. That I happen to be rewatching the drama John Adams on DVD with my father for the third time (a number that does not include my own personal private rewatches) is entirely incidental. (Ha!)
I am happy to report that Rambling with Milton more than lives up to its source material. And for those coming from the same place as me––not quite convinced that there’s a romance book out there for you––I would argue that this book is the perfect introduction. It’s a beautifully written, incredibly detailed, and thoroughly compelling novel about triumphing in the midst of a truly difficult moment of life. It follows many characters but centers on Prudence and Jock. They meet when he is living the life of a starving artist, performing one-man plays at community centers like retirement homes––and rehabilitation facilities. At one of these rehab facilities, he stumbles across Prudence, a patient recovering from an overdose. He, an author whose bestseller days are far behind him, connects with her, a former librarian who remembers having seen his book on one of the library’s displays and read his newspaper column, “Rambling with Milton”––way back in the days before they became who they are at the book’s start: two people very far from the golden days of youth.
But having found each other, they also find that their lives are filled with opportunities they had never before expected and that there is still the possibility of finding joy, no matter how difficult the present moment. Having found each other, they find a way forward. What follows is itself a bit of a ramble but a pleasant and delightful one that elevates “ramble” to the heights of a slow-but-steady romance of the highest quality. It is a romance that cares about its characters and in so doing, convinces its readers to love them as well. And that’s the kind of romance I can unabashedly and publicly recommend!
I’ve previously mentioned in one of my reviews that I am somewhat at a loss when reviewing romance novels, simply because I haven’t read many of them to date. For many years, I deliberately steered clear, thinking that the genre was limited when it came to the literary qualities that I look for in books. However, I have since learned that even old dogs can learn to like new genres and to both honor and celebrate the sheer diversity of books and qualities that appear in and are specific to the romance genre. Of course, all of this is an awkward way of explaining that: if a romance novel impresses me, the grumpy hermit with a really high bar when it comes to new things and changing my mind about something, it truly is a remarkable book.
IN SUMMARY:
A well-plotted romance with more than the average novel’s quality of backstory and character development, Rambling with Milton is a thoughtful look at everything that can go wrong in life—and everything that can go right.
WHERE TO BUY?
You can also learn more about Richard Siciliano’s work on the book’s Outskirts PressAuthor Page.
ABOUT KENDRA M.: With nine years in library service, six years of working within the self-publishing world, and extensive experience in creative writing, freelance online content creation, and podcast editing, Kendra seeks to amplify the voices of those who need and deserve the most to be heard.
We all have only one life to live. It is safe to assume that we all want to live a long, healthy life free from pain, disease, and untimely death. A New Lease on Life helps us to do that based on research by various authorities, primarily in holistic medicine. It shows you how the body works and what you can do to help it do its work of self-repair or healing. We learn that the body balances its alkalinity and acidity at an 80/20 percent ratio. The foods we eat need to follow that ratio of 80 percent alkaline and 20 percent acid-forming foods. Because we cannot follow this 4:1 ratio, the body must break down healthy structures and tissues in a process called catabolism. This is needed to keep us within 7.4 pH (slightly alkaline range), especially in our inner cavity, to keep our vital organs from dying. In addition, every fat, mostly cellulose, is pushed out and stored elsewhere in the body to keep us from dying prematurely.
Since health depends on detoxification and nourishment, we must find the best means to detox and nourish our system. Detoxification is best achieved by ionized, alkaline, microstructured hexagonal water, which can easily penetrate our cells to deliver oxygen and nutrients while cleansing them on their way out. Without good water—not just any water—the cells cannot receive nutrients easily and keep them clean. This results in excess tissue acid waste, the root cause of pain and numerous diseases. It also deprives our cells of needed nutrients that cause nutritional deficiency diseases leading to untimely death. Therefore, your longevity depends on how well you take care of your cells since the cells are not supposed to die, and you could live to over 100 years, as is known in Japan and many other cultures.
REVIEW:
Oh boy, am I not drinking the right water?
This, my friends, is precisely what went through my head when I first picked up James Ocansey’s A New Lease on Life, which is blurbed entirely accurately in the description from Bookshop.org that I’ve included above, which is where I first found this book.
But first, to back up a minute: Those of you who have read my last review will remember that my response to that book was primarily the product of my recent experiences in and out of area health facilities as my family battled its way through a long, strenuous, and even to some extent, ongoing medical emergencies of the most dramatic kind. As with many people, it took something of such medical gravity to force me to reevaluate my own life choices, particularly in what I eat and drink. And while there are plenty of books on the former, the latter doesn’t seem to be talked about or researched to the same extent, outside of studies about known toxins and “please drink in moderation” sorts of drinks, such as those containing alcohol or caffeine. But if a person were to wonder, as I indeed have found myself wondering, whether there might be something more fundamental and elementary going on when it comes to “drinking well” in the same way that nutrition is essential and elemental to “eating well,” that person might find a compelling answer in James Ocansey’s A New Lease on Life.
This is a research-based take on water, the most basic of all molecules necessary to life barring only the carbon atom, which enables complex life. Water is where we all started, the science seems to say, whether we’re talking literally or in a profound metaphorical sense. Our bodies are primarily made up of water, after all. I could drill down into the protean images of the womb and of creation narratives featuring a separation of land and sky from water—but I’ve only budgeted one on-the-nose metaphor for this review. I don’t want to try your patience before even getting to the real, er, elemental components of this review.
I know, I’m the absolute worst when it comes to puns, irony, and dad jokes. If our bodies are made of 90 percent (or some large percentage) of water, my soul is made of 90 percent dad jokes—terrible, awful, unbearable dad jokes.
Luckily, Ocansey is made of sterner, more academically reliable stuff than dad jokes, and I mean what I say. This book draws upon the results of a 12+ year study of pollution’s effects on the cellular level, a study involving scientists and researchers across multiple fields and disciplines. Dr. Joel Wallach was the chief pathologist. He conducted autopsies on 17,500 animals of 454 species and 3.000 humans for comparison. He concluded that “it was apparent that every animal and every human who dies of natural causes dies of a nutritional deficiency disease” and that this malnutrition is the result not of poor food quality or quantity but rather the water these unfortunate creatures consumed.
As we millennials like to say, this is mind-blowing stuff!
As Ocansey puts it, water is the “missing link” to good health, and the fundamental component missing in a world devoid of strong water knowledge (much less good water quality and infrastructure). I am, of course, no water expert (or true scientist, much as I love to participate in citizen science research and promote STEM learning for all). Still, the science in A New Lease on Life is well presented and easy enough to understand, particularly if a reader is already familiar with the scientific method.
“You’re not only thirsty but starving,” declares Ocansey in the subtitle to A New Lease on Life. This is the basis of the book’s argument: Water detoxifies, and water nourishes. It not only washes the body clean of toxins, but it also can contribute significantly to good nutrition if consumed in the right way and if made up of the right kind of water. I’m still parsing some of the finer points of Ocansey’s argument, but the research does seem clear on what it is indicating. There is such a thing as “hexagonal water,” a specific molecular arrangement of ordinary H2O which can potentially make a difference in longevity and general quality of life.
A New Lease on Life also contains arguments for several other potential health-boosting supplements and aids, but it is primarily concerned with the H2O mentioned above. It has everything from a doctor to patient to scientific testimony about the efficacy of all of the above. It is well worth a read if you are looking to delve into a brave new world of nutrition dramatically different from those diets, regimens, and other fads that come and go with the years. You may or not find yourself convinced—that is always a risk when it comes to an argument-based book—but you will most definitely find yourself asking important questions that need to be asked about the ways we have been doing things and where we want to go from here, healthwise.
I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
ABOUT KENDRA M.: With nine years in library service, six years of working within the self-publishing world, and extensive experience in creative writing, freelance online content creation, and podcast editing, Kendra seeks to amplify the voices of those who need and deserve the most to be heard.
Self Publishing Advisor 